After six months in St. Helena, we moved into a rented cottage in Calistoga, with a fig tree in the yard and a continually flooded basement. I learned for the first time the value and importance of the sump pump, because the water table was high enough to float the house during the wet season, and we had to worry when the water level got above three inches. Outside on the street there was a drainage ditch plentifully populated with spring peepers and other croaking amphibians. The noise they made almost drowned out the sound of the stock-car races at the county stadium, a block west of us. Almost. We had brought a cat with us from Peter Mennen's place, Buckwheat, a barn tabby who remained an outside cat. She was pregnant. I think she had been pregnant continually since reaching puberty. Her kittens were born, and I gave them all cereal names, but only kept one of them, Tapioca, who was white and adorable. So adorable that her putative father, a sandy-haired tom from up the street, was in the habit of grasping her firmly but gently by the nape and carrying her off to show his owners. I had to keep going over there and bringing her back. The other kittens I managed to give away by going to the local grocery store with them in a cardboard box and sitting in the parking lot all day, pleading with shoppers to take a free kitten.
Ron had settled in as lunch chef and evening sous-chef, and was learning a lot about sauces from Masa Kobayashi, the head chef. Masa was a brilliant chef who was almost completely nonverbal in several languages. I remember going to a party at the house of one of the Auberge cooks up in Angwin, a strange little town up in the hills which was primarily Seventh-Day Adventist, but also boasted a fairly large population of dopers and speedfreaks; Angwin was home to Pacific Union college, a SDA school, and also to the big co-op grocery store which was completely vegetarian, and where you could get all sorts of faux meats. Masa and his wife Josphine (who was from Spain and did not have much English either) arrived, sat down with their drinks, sat completely unspeaking for two hours (even to each other), and then left. Ron told me that most of his communication with Masa was in the form of grunts and hand signals. Later on, Masa moved to San Francisco to open his own restaurant; he was found murdered in his apartment in 1984. The crime has never been solved, but the Auberge people had a good idea of who did it.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
During the year before we moved north, Ron and I had made a batch of blackberry wine from blackberries we had gathered on San Bruno Mountain. It was in a large plastic garbage can which sat in my studio. Over the course of several months it gradually began smelling a lot more like wine rather than rotten blackberries, so we took it along with us when we moved. It was completely black in color, so when we bottled it in Peter's kitchen I made labels reading:
Chateau de Spodiodi
Black Death
1981
Estate Bottled
We gave most of it away, but only D and her boyfriend Creagh, who had taken over our old flat on Fifth Avenue, were brave enough to drink it. I actually still have a bottle of it, which will never be opened if I can possibly help it. It contains so much residue that it's completely opaque, and after 27 years I imagine it has gone way past vinegar to something that will rot anything it touches. It's sitting on my death altar, a good place for it, along with pictures of my Beloved Dead, bones, animal skulls, and the usual Witchy Crone paraphernalia.
That was our only venture into home wine-making, though Ron has periodically made noises about brewing beer ever since. It'll happen.
I had worked very hard over the years to reconstruct Compost Coven, initiating a lot of people and trying to get it rolling independent of me. I was High Priestess after Starhawk and all the others left, and I transferred the role to several people in turn: Leah, Linda, Decius, and then Leah again. I had also started a second group, called Sunshine because we met in daylight, with Jo Steen, Diane, and another witch named Thelma. Thelma was a nurse who lived in Calistoga but spent her work-week in San Francisco, so there was one Witchy contact in the Valley. But somehow we could never get anything going up there where she lived. Her husband wasn't a Witch, and she was pretty much in the closet, with limited free time. Some of the Composters would come up and visit from time to time, but I really missed all the people who used to come and go through my flat for classes, rituals, mojo-making sessions, and so on, which had occupied a lot of my time.
Some of them were pretty interesting. There was one woman, Mariette, who was extremely paranoid about being under magickal attack and was continually begging me for advice about protection spells. What I wanted to tell her, but was too polite to, was that if she didn't have such a suspicious attitude toward people she wouldn't draw negative energy from them. She ended up getting angry at me and stomping away in a huff, which is how every relationship in her life had ended. Some people just can't see patterns. There was Janine, a lesbian whom I married to her girlfriend Dean; unfortunately, Dean dumped Janine in order to undergo a sex change and marry Peggy, a woman who had formerly been a man. Dean and Peggy moved to the suburbs and lived as a straight couple (I always thought that they were certainly going the long way around to get there). And there was Joseph, gay as a goose and given to rolling about in the bushes with anonymous partners in Buena Vista Park. When I heard later that Joseph had died of AIDS I was not at all surprised.
One of my former students, Don, had moved to Japan to teach English at the same time I moved north, but kept in touch and let me know about this amazing shaman he had discovered, Dairyu-san. Dairyu-san was noted for dispelling curses and expelling fox-spirits; Don had met him through Yoshiko, a woman he became friendly with, an artist who was very involved with finding remnants of the folk-religion of Japan which were still in practice. Yoshiko took Don to many sacred sites which he never could have found on his own, and introduced him to people like Dairyu-san, whom he would never have met. He loved it in Japan because it was so very pagan a place. And of course, he fell madly in love with Yoshiko.
Chateau de Spodiodi
Black Death
1981
Estate Bottled
We gave most of it away, but only D and her boyfriend Creagh, who had taken over our old flat on Fifth Avenue, were brave enough to drink it. I actually still have a bottle of it, which will never be opened if I can possibly help it. It contains so much residue that it's completely opaque, and after 27 years I imagine it has gone way past vinegar to something that will rot anything it touches. It's sitting on my death altar, a good place for it, along with pictures of my Beloved Dead, bones, animal skulls, and the usual Witchy Crone paraphernalia.
That was our only venture into home wine-making, though Ron has periodically made noises about brewing beer ever since. It'll happen.
I had worked very hard over the years to reconstruct Compost Coven, initiating a lot of people and trying to get it rolling independent of me. I was High Priestess after Starhawk and all the others left, and I transferred the role to several people in turn: Leah, Linda, Decius, and then Leah again. I had also started a second group, called Sunshine because we met in daylight, with Jo Steen, Diane, and another witch named Thelma. Thelma was a nurse who lived in Calistoga but spent her work-week in San Francisco, so there was one Witchy contact in the Valley. But somehow we could never get anything going up there where she lived. Her husband wasn't a Witch, and she was pretty much in the closet, with limited free time. Some of the Composters would come up and visit from time to time, but I really missed all the people who used to come and go through my flat for classes, rituals, mojo-making sessions, and so on, which had occupied a lot of my time.
Some of them were pretty interesting. There was one woman, Mariette, who was extremely paranoid about being under magickal attack and was continually begging me for advice about protection spells. What I wanted to tell her, but was too polite to, was that if she didn't have such a suspicious attitude toward people she wouldn't draw negative energy from them. She ended up getting angry at me and stomping away in a huff, which is how every relationship in her life had ended. Some people just can't see patterns. There was Janine, a lesbian whom I married to her girlfriend Dean; unfortunately, Dean dumped Janine in order to undergo a sex change and marry Peggy, a woman who had formerly been a man. Dean and Peggy moved to the suburbs and lived as a straight couple (I always thought that they were certainly going the long way around to get there). And there was Joseph, gay as a goose and given to rolling about in the bushes with anonymous partners in Buena Vista Park. When I heard later that Joseph had died of AIDS I was not at all surprised.
One of my former students, Don, had moved to Japan to teach English at the same time I moved north, but kept in touch and let me know about this amazing shaman he had discovered, Dairyu-san. Dairyu-san was noted for dispelling curses and expelling fox-spirits; Don had met him through Yoshiko, a woman he became friendly with, an artist who was very involved with finding remnants of the folk-religion of Japan which were still in practice. Yoshiko took Don to many sacred sites which he never could have found on his own, and introduced him to people like Dairyu-san, whom he would never have met. He loved it in Japan because it was so very pagan a place. And of course, he fell madly in love with Yoshiko.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee, Drinkin' Wine
The journey home was marked by rain, rain, and more rain. We were dropped off at the Novato headquarters of Rites of Passage, and expected to make our own ways home; but there had been flooding on the highways, with more expected. I caught a ride back to San Francisco with Linda, a fellow-witch, and as it turned out ours was the last car to make it out of Novato before the clouds began to empty themselves once again. I felt that this was significant in some way. Narrow escape from...something I couldn't explain, but I knew that luck was n my side.
I had to hold that thought during the move north to the Napa Valley. Certainly it was luck that had brought my meeting with Peter Mennen, postmaster of St. Helena, owner of a house on the Silverado Trail he was trying to sell, and in need of someone to house-sit. Peter's house was fully-furnished, so we shoved all our own furniture into one of the outbuildings and settled in. It was a mile or so to St. Helena, a good walk or a short bike ride northward on the Silverado Trail, left over the narrow Pope Street bridge (speed limit 10 mph), and onward to town. Traffic on the Trail was fast and furious; one of the two northward routes in the Valley, Silverado Trail was the one the locals used. Route 29, which ran through town, was for the tourists, most of whom were drunk from visiting the wineries along the highway and indulging in free wine-tastings. Not that the locals speeding along the Trail were much better-- nobody paid any attention to any posted speed limits, and it was up to pedestrians and bike-riders to take care of themselves.
At the beginning of the twentieth century there had been over 140 wineries in the Napa Valley, but most of them were wiped out by the double whammy of Prohibition and the phylloxera root louse infestation, which set back the wine industry until the end of the Second World War. Several of the original wineries still exist in the valley today, including Charles Krug Winery, Shramsburg, Chateau Montelena, and Beringer. But even in the old days the Napa Valley had not been a monoculture as it is today. Our nearest across-the-road neighbors were a couple of locals who had been born and raised in the valley. Born-and-raised were, for the most part, rural conservatives who looked with disdain on all the incomers, even though the incomers had money to burn. The born-and-raised remembered the Valley when there were other crops other than grapevines, before the tourists began to arrive in droves, before the farms gave way to vineyards with wineries attached, built in the form of castles, chalets, chapels, and any other shape that took the fancy of the new owners.
I was an oddity in the Valley, I didn't drink at all, and wasn't interested in the more arcane aspects of making a good bottle of wine. I went dutifully along with Ron on wine-tasting tours, but was more interested in the history of the place. There was an old wine cave in the back of Peter's house which had been hewn out of the rock by Chinese laborers; but the Chinese had vanished. They had been forced out of the Valley decades before, and been replaced as the laboring class by Mexican workers. There was a Mexican restaurant up in Calistoga, and another one in St. Helena, but there were no Chinese restaurants at the time. And I saw very few African-Americans. Apparently, Napa Valley in the 1980's was a white enclave.
The journey home was marked by rain, rain, and more rain. We were dropped off at the Novato headquarters of Rites of Passage, and expected to make our own ways home; but there had been flooding on the highways, with more expected. I caught a ride back to San Francisco with Linda, a fellow-witch, and as it turned out ours was the last car to make it out of Novato before the clouds began to empty themselves once again. I felt that this was significant in some way. Narrow escape from...something I couldn't explain, but I knew that luck was n my side.
I had to hold that thought during the move north to the Napa Valley. Certainly it was luck that had brought my meeting with Peter Mennen, postmaster of St. Helena, owner of a house on the Silverado Trail he was trying to sell, and in need of someone to house-sit. Peter's house was fully-furnished, so we shoved all our own furniture into one of the outbuildings and settled in. It was a mile or so to St. Helena, a good walk or a short bike ride northward on the Silverado Trail, left over the narrow Pope Street bridge (speed limit 10 mph), and onward to town. Traffic on the Trail was fast and furious; one of the two northward routes in the Valley, Silverado Trail was the one the locals used. Route 29, which ran through town, was for the tourists, most of whom were drunk from visiting the wineries along the highway and indulging in free wine-tastings. Not that the locals speeding along the Trail were much better-- nobody paid any attention to any posted speed limits, and it was up to pedestrians and bike-riders to take care of themselves.
At the beginning of the twentieth century there had been over 140 wineries in the Napa Valley, but most of them were wiped out by the double whammy of Prohibition and the phylloxera root louse infestation, which set back the wine industry until the end of the Second World War. Several of the original wineries still exist in the valley today, including Charles Krug Winery, Shramsburg, Chateau Montelena, and Beringer. But even in the old days the Napa Valley had not been a monoculture as it is today. Our nearest across-the-road neighbors were a couple of locals who had been born and raised in the valley. Born-and-raised were, for the most part, rural conservatives who looked with disdain on all the incomers, even though the incomers had money to burn. The born-and-raised remembered the Valley when there were other crops other than grapevines, before the tourists began to arrive in droves, before the farms gave way to vineyards with wineries attached, built in the form of castles, chalets, chapels, and any other shape that took the fancy of the new owners.
I was an oddity in the Valley, I didn't drink at all, and wasn't interested in the more arcane aspects of making a good bottle of wine. I went dutifully along with Ron on wine-tasting tours, but was more interested in the history of the place. There was an old wine cave in the back of Peter's house which had been hewn out of the rock by Chinese laborers; but the Chinese had vanished. They had been forced out of the Valley decades before, and been replaced as the laboring class by Mexican workers. There was a Mexican restaurant up in Calistoga, and another one in St. Helena, but there were no Chinese restaurants at the time. And I saw very few African-Americans. Apparently, Napa Valley in the 1980's was a white enclave.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
The next morning I packed up my gear and tidied up my circle preparatory to returning to base camp. I had trekked in with 16 pounds of water, and I trekked out with 20 pounds of rocks. I was especially careful to take the direction rocks, as the circle will probably be there in Death Valley forever and I didn't want to leave any object-links. (If anyone else ever uses that circle again, they will have to pick out new rocks for the Watchtowers of the directions. I can't be doing all their Magickal work for them.)
Everyone back by the base-camp fire that night was pretty quiet, letting their solitary quests and their varied results cook for a while before the return to everyday life. We did a ritual based on the Medicine wheel and had a feast that night. Food tasted really wonderful, and the questers kept finding themselves smiling at each other for no reason; but there was a tinge of sadness, because our fellowship was coming to an end. Plans were made for a sweat lodge up in Novato during the next month, but we knew that trip-friendships, close as they become during the trip, seldom result in long-lasting relationships. It had been true for acid trips, and it was true for vision quests as well. A shared excursion into other worlds rarely carries over into the mundane world, and the intensity of the love is always weakened by the journey home. I think that the only place where this intense closeness can be maintained is in a group which meets regularly for spiritual work, like a coven, and even then there will be inevitable conflicts. Shamans don't usually run in groups. And even most Witches don't either; most of my Witchy friends are solitaries who just get together on special occasions. I have always rather envied the congregations of the christians, Jews, and other group religions because of that ongoing relationship. But then on the other hand, solitary Witches don't have anyone telling them what to do... Perhaps that's why so many covens and other group efforts become prey to the cult of personality, setting up one person as the Great Leader. It still gives me a bit of uneasiness when people address me as their teacher-- or Teacher. Even though I've taught the Craft, both Feri and non-, it has always, always, been up to the individual student what they kept of what I showed them and what they discarded.
But at the time I was transitioning from being a teacher of Wicca 101 to something else, solitary perforce because of the move to the Napa Valley, where I knew nobody. One piece of more-or-less Witchy advice which was given me directly at the final campfire ritual was the admonition from one of the guides to put less emphasis on the West / Water and look to the South / Fire more. This is shorthand for putting less emphasis in my life on the realm of the unconscious, secrets, and dreams, and more on that of energy, will, and physicality.
And for the next few years I would follow that advice.
Everyone back by the base-camp fire that night was pretty quiet, letting their solitary quests and their varied results cook for a while before the return to everyday life. We did a ritual based on the Medicine wheel and had a feast that night. Food tasted really wonderful, and the questers kept finding themselves smiling at each other for no reason; but there was a tinge of sadness, because our fellowship was coming to an end. Plans were made for a sweat lodge up in Novato during the next month, but we knew that trip-friendships, close as they become during the trip, seldom result in long-lasting relationships. It had been true for acid trips, and it was true for vision quests as well. A shared excursion into other worlds rarely carries over into the mundane world, and the intensity of the love is always weakened by the journey home. I think that the only place where this intense closeness can be maintained is in a group which meets regularly for spiritual work, like a coven, and even then there will be inevitable conflicts. Shamans don't usually run in groups. And even most Witches don't either; most of my Witchy friends are solitaries who just get together on special occasions. I have always rather envied the congregations of the christians, Jews, and other group religions because of that ongoing relationship. But then on the other hand, solitary Witches don't have anyone telling them what to do... Perhaps that's why so many covens and other group efforts become prey to the cult of personality, setting up one person as the Great Leader. It still gives me a bit of uneasiness when people address me as their teacher-- or Teacher. Even though I've taught the Craft, both Feri and non-, it has always, always, been up to the individual student what they kept of what I showed them and what they discarded.
But at the time I was transitioning from being a teacher of Wicca 101 to something else, solitary perforce because of the move to the Napa Valley, where I knew nobody. One piece of more-or-less Witchy advice which was given me directly at the final campfire ritual was the admonition from one of the guides to put less emphasis on the West / Water and look to the South / Fire more. This is shorthand for putting less emphasis in my life on the realm of the unconscious, secrets, and dreams, and more on that of energy, will, and physicality.
And for the next few years I would follow that advice.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Goin' Up the Country
Rites of Passage is an organization based in Novato, California, which runs vision quests in remote areas throughout the Western states. Groups of adults or adolescents would sign up, and after several prep meetings in Novato a group would be transported by bus to the site for a week of roughing it alone, though within access to a base camp. My group of ten questers was going to Death Valley, in the week between Xmas and New Year's, so we would spend New Year's Eve out in the desert. The idea of the quest was to grow our own rites of passage in a place that took us out of our modern life and faced us with nature, such rites and such connection with the natural world having mostly fallen out of practice in modern life. Rites of Passage founders Stephen and Meredith Foster were our instructors during the preparation, which took place over six weeks, and some of their staff would go with the group to serve as guides and maintain the base camp. We were to stay at base camp for the first couple of nights, exploring the nearby landscape for a personal place to stay and picking a buddy with whom to communicate by leaving messages at an agreed-upon location during our solitary quest.
The bus journey from Novato was guaranteed to bring on my carsickness, so I dosed myself liberally with Dramamine, and spent most of the time either drowsing or asleep. There was some delay when one of the group's two buses broke down in the middle of nowhere, but the refugees from the other bus climbed on to the one I was in, loaded with camping gear, and somehow we managed to shoehorn everyone and their equipment in and continue on our way. We broke for supper after driving since early in the morning at the Homestead Restaurant in Inyokern, last chance for meat in days. The food was old-fashioned small-town American, lavish in quantity and delicious. We ate like pigs. Very happy pigs.
Arriving by moonlight at the drop-off site in Death Valley National Park, we stumbled sleepily off the bus and loaded ourselves with our gear, including food and water in gallon jugs. Then we trailed after our guides on a course perpendicular to the road, heading roughly toward the Funeral Mountains in the east. About a mile from the road we established our base camp, built a fire, and set up our tents. The stars were incredible, and the occasional meteor flashed overhead. The air was chilly, but we were dressed warmly, and the fire cast a comfortable glow on the group as we milled around, trying to dispel the stiffness brought on by fourteen hours on the bus.
Although a lot of the preparatory meetings had been about practical matters, such as the possibility of running into a rattlesnake (pretty slim, as they generally hibernate in the winter) and what to do in case of medical emergency, a large proportion had been devoted to the reasons for taking up this kind of quest. The groups of adolescents Rites of Passage guided through the wilderness were usually at-risk kids, for whom a real rite of passage was lacking in their ordinary life, and for whom, hopefully, this kind of quest would serve to mark their transition from child to adult, and lessen their need to mark their status by getting into trouble. The adult groups, however, were less homogeneous in their motives. There would be people who were in a life-crisis such as widowhood or divorce, women who were facing menopause, people in religious crisis, and so on. I was not precisely in major crisis mode, but the uprooting of my life by a move from San Francisco to the Napa Valley was a frightening prospect. I loved it in San Francisco. I had made myself a life there. I knew nobody in the Valley, and even though it would be relatively easy to transfer my mail-order business to a more rural setting, I felt intimidated. So this vision quest would serve for me as a magickal doorway through which to step and come out the other side better fitted for the challenges of a new life. Well, that was the idea, anyway. But I had to admit I was a bit turned off by the Fosters' emphasis on how wrenchingly painful the process would be. Go out into the desert, check. Be alone three days and nights, check. Fast during the solitary time, check. I could do all that. But "cry for a vision"? Spend the entire time in tears? That seemed a little extreme.
During the two nights the group spent at base camp, there was a lot of this sort of talk. I didn't say so, but I felt that people were making it harder on themselves than necessary. Important dreams and visions weren't that difficult to get, especially if one was off in this otherworldly place, alone, fasting. I had been trying for visions and trances for years, with varying levels of success. The desert seemed like a natural place to look for this kind of magickal experience. So when I went off by myself on the first day after arrival to look for a place to stay, I simply ignored everything I had been taught and went with my intuition. I found a flat little plain with one upright rock sticking out of it, facing a row of cliffs with little caves in them, and decided to make a magick circle there. I had arranged with my buddy to leave daily signals at a rock shelf halfway between my site and the base camp. If one of us didn't leave her signal, the other one was to report to base camp and the guides would initiate a search. We didn't know where each other's site was, but we would never be more than 24 hours from help. As it turned out, my site was the closest to base camp of anyone's in the group; some people went miles into the desert, but I liked my little valley. Besides, we had to trek in with all the water we would need for two days and three nights, about a gallon a day, and a gallon jug of water weighs 16 pounds. I was not about to lug all that halfway to the Funeral Mountains.
We also took our sleeping bags and tarps, a tin cup, matches, a Swiss Army knife, and a lemon. Over my sweatshirt, jacket, and warm pants, I wore my home-made black hooded robe with the tassel made of flax that I had grown and dyed myself, and the eucalyptus wood staff that I had found in Golden Gate park and peeled of bark and decorated with beads, thongs, paint, and feathers. One of the other questers gave me a terrycloth headband with devil's horns attached, and, horns protruding from under my Goodwill knitted cap to which I had fastened a shell (well, I was on pilgrimage, after all), I set off with my buddy to the signal rock, said farewell and went on to my valley. If there were giants, I was ready.
There were plenty of rocks of all different colors in the area, and I scraped the area of my circle out with my feet, because it was easier than bending down and picking up all those rocks. At the edges I made a rim of rocks, color-matched to the directions: yellow for the East, red for the South, black for the West, and white for the North. The single standing stone was inside the circle toward the North, and I set up my sleeping area with my back to it, facing the cliff. At the exact point of each direction I placed stones which seemed to symbolize those directions: fossils from the long-ago ocean which once covered the valley, spirals and heart shapes and circles and squares. There was such a profusion of really wonderful stones to use that they might have been waiting all those centuries for me to come and organize them.
The weather was cold at night but days were quite mild, with temperatures in the sixties, and for the duration of my solitary time I enjoyed wandering around the immediate area, looking for rocks, or sitting in the winter sun making gods-eyes out of the yarn and sticks I had brought with me, or writing voluminously in my journal. I dreamed a lot at night, dreams I considered to be significant, and much of my journaling was devoted to describing and analyzing the meaning of these dreams. One dream was of being taken in off the cold bitter street by the Wolf Mother and comforted by her, put to bed like the little child my dreamself was, and fed. In daylight I was quite encouraged by the nature of these dreams, which seemed to be a validation of my own way of doing spiritual things. I didn't have to cry for a vision: the reality of the landscape was vision enough. I was a part of it, just as much as the rattlesnakes sleeping in their holes or the creosote bushes from which I gathered twigs to make my tiny fire in the morning, or the fire itself. The night sky was cold and distant and awesome, but I belonged to it and to the rocks. They knew me and I knew them.
On the night of New Year's Eve I had been told to sit up and stay awake all night, as this was the last night of the three. I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag and then in a layer of plastic tarp, and sat with my back to the standing rock, which protected me somewhat from the wind, which was biting. The sky was perfectly clear, and it was very cold. I had saved a bit of my lemon and put it in my tin cup with some water I heated over a minuscule fire, and sipped at it whenever I felt chilled. There were many meteorites that night, and the moon shone on the face of the cliff, showing the little caves like dark eyes in the rock watching me. Gradually the stars wheeled above me. The only discomfort I felt was that after sitting for several hours my butt was paralyzed, but I remedied that by getting up every so often, still encased in my sleeping bag and tarp, and jumping up and down (which must have looked pretty silly). Whenever I had to pee I dashed outside the circle, disarranged as few garments as absolutely necessary, did my business, and dashed back to the sleeping bag as fast as possible. The second time, I noticed that my first little puddle had frozen solid, so the temperature was somewhere below 32°. My plastic-wrapped cocoon was warm and comfortable, however, and I felt quite happy to be there. For all that I had always tended to avoid being alone as a continual state in life, I was content with my own company.
Rites of Passage is an organization based in Novato, California, which runs vision quests in remote areas throughout the Western states. Groups of adults or adolescents would sign up, and after several prep meetings in Novato a group would be transported by bus to the site for a week of roughing it alone, though within access to a base camp. My group of ten questers was going to Death Valley, in the week between Xmas and New Year's, so we would spend New Year's Eve out in the desert. The idea of the quest was to grow our own rites of passage in a place that took us out of our modern life and faced us with nature, such rites and such connection with the natural world having mostly fallen out of practice in modern life. Rites of Passage founders Stephen and Meredith Foster were our instructors during the preparation, which took place over six weeks, and some of their staff would go with the group to serve as guides and maintain the base camp. We were to stay at base camp for the first couple of nights, exploring the nearby landscape for a personal place to stay and picking a buddy with whom to communicate by leaving messages at an agreed-upon location during our solitary quest.
The bus journey from Novato was guaranteed to bring on my carsickness, so I dosed myself liberally with Dramamine, and spent most of the time either drowsing or asleep. There was some delay when one of the group's two buses broke down in the middle of nowhere, but the refugees from the other bus climbed on to the one I was in, loaded with camping gear, and somehow we managed to shoehorn everyone and their equipment in and continue on our way. We broke for supper after driving since early in the morning at the Homestead Restaurant in Inyokern, last chance for meat in days. The food was old-fashioned small-town American, lavish in quantity and delicious. We ate like pigs. Very happy pigs.
Arriving by moonlight at the drop-off site in Death Valley National Park, we stumbled sleepily off the bus and loaded ourselves with our gear, including food and water in gallon jugs. Then we trailed after our guides on a course perpendicular to the road, heading roughly toward the Funeral Mountains in the east. About a mile from the road we established our base camp, built a fire, and set up our tents. The stars were incredible, and the occasional meteor flashed overhead. The air was chilly, but we were dressed warmly, and the fire cast a comfortable glow on the group as we milled around, trying to dispel the stiffness brought on by fourteen hours on the bus.
Although a lot of the preparatory meetings had been about practical matters, such as the possibility of running into a rattlesnake (pretty slim, as they generally hibernate in the winter) and what to do in case of medical emergency, a large proportion had been devoted to the reasons for taking up this kind of quest. The groups of adolescents Rites of Passage guided through the wilderness were usually at-risk kids, for whom a real rite of passage was lacking in their ordinary life, and for whom, hopefully, this kind of quest would serve to mark their transition from child to adult, and lessen their need to mark their status by getting into trouble. The adult groups, however, were less homogeneous in their motives. There would be people who were in a life-crisis such as widowhood or divorce, women who were facing menopause, people in religious crisis, and so on. I was not precisely in major crisis mode, but the uprooting of my life by a move from San Francisco to the Napa Valley was a frightening prospect. I loved it in San Francisco. I had made myself a life there. I knew nobody in the Valley, and even though it would be relatively easy to transfer my mail-order business to a more rural setting, I felt intimidated. So this vision quest would serve for me as a magickal doorway through which to step and come out the other side better fitted for the challenges of a new life. Well, that was the idea, anyway. But I had to admit I was a bit turned off by the Fosters' emphasis on how wrenchingly painful the process would be. Go out into the desert, check. Be alone three days and nights, check. Fast during the solitary time, check. I could do all that. But "cry for a vision"? Spend the entire time in tears? That seemed a little extreme.
During the two nights the group spent at base camp, there was a lot of this sort of talk. I didn't say so, but I felt that people were making it harder on themselves than necessary. Important dreams and visions weren't that difficult to get, especially if one was off in this otherworldly place, alone, fasting. I had been trying for visions and trances for years, with varying levels of success. The desert seemed like a natural place to look for this kind of magickal experience. So when I went off by myself on the first day after arrival to look for a place to stay, I simply ignored everything I had been taught and went with my intuition. I found a flat little plain with one upright rock sticking out of it, facing a row of cliffs with little caves in them, and decided to make a magick circle there. I had arranged with my buddy to leave daily signals at a rock shelf halfway between my site and the base camp. If one of us didn't leave her signal, the other one was to report to base camp and the guides would initiate a search. We didn't know where each other's site was, but we would never be more than 24 hours from help. As it turned out, my site was the closest to base camp of anyone's in the group; some people went miles into the desert, but I liked my little valley. Besides, we had to trek in with all the water we would need for two days and three nights, about a gallon a day, and a gallon jug of water weighs 16 pounds. I was not about to lug all that halfway to the Funeral Mountains.
We also took our sleeping bags and tarps, a tin cup, matches, a Swiss Army knife, and a lemon. Over my sweatshirt, jacket, and warm pants, I wore my home-made black hooded robe with the tassel made of flax that I had grown and dyed myself, and the eucalyptus wood staff that I had found in Golden Gate park and peeled of bark and decorated with beads, thongs, paint, and feathers. One of the other questers gave me a terrycloth headband with devil's horns attached, and, horns protruding from under my Goodwill knitted cap to which I had fastened a shell (well, I was on pilgrimage, after all), I set off with my buddy to the signal rock, said farewell and went on to my valley. If there were giants, I was ready.
There were plenty of rocks of all different colors in the area, and I scraped the area of my circle out with my feet, because it was easier than bending down and picking up all those rocks. At the edges I made a rim of rocks, color-matched to the directions: yellow for the East, red for the South, black for the West, and white for the North. The single standing stone was inside the circle toward the North, and I set up my sleeping area with my back to it, facing the cliff. At the exact point of each direction I placed stones which seemed to symbolize those directions: fossils from the long-ago ocean which once covered the valley, spirals and heart shapes and circles and squares. There was such a profusion of really wonderful stones to use that they might have been waiting all those centuries for me to come and organize them.
The weather was cold at night but days were quite mild, with temperatures in the sixties, and for the duration of my solitary time I enjoyed wandering around the immediate area, looking for rocks, or sitting in the winter sun making gods-eyes out of the yarn and sticks I had brought with me, or writing voluminously in my journal. I dreamed a lot at night, dreams I considered to be significant, and much of my journaling was devoted to describing and analyzing the meaning of these dreams. One dream was of being taken in off the cold bitter street by the Wolf Mother and comforted by her, put to bed like the little child my dreamself was, and fed. In daylight I was quite encouraged by the nature of these dreams, which seemed to be a validation of my own way of doing spiritual things. I didn't have to cry for a vision: the reality of the landscape was vision enough. I was a part of it, just as much as the rattlesnakes sleeping in their holes or the creosote bushes from which I gathered twigs to make my tiny fire in the morning, or the fire itself. The night sky was cold and distant and awesome, but I belonged to it and to the rocks. They knew me and I knew them.
On the night of New Year's Eve I had been told to sit up and stay awake all night, as this was the last night of the three. I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag and then in a layer of plastic tarp, and sat with my back to the standing rock, which protected me somewhat from the wind, which was biting. The sky was perfectly clear, and it was very cold. I had saved a bit of my lemon and put it in my tin cup with some water I heated over a minuscule fire, and sipped at it whenever I felt chilled. There were many meteorites that night, and the moon shone on the face of the cliff, showing the little caves like dark eyes in the rock watching me. Gradually the stars wheeled above me. The only discomfort I felt was that after sitting for several hours my butt was paralyzed, but I remedied that by getting up every so often, still encased in my sleeping bag and tarp, and jumping up and down (which must have looked pretty silly). Whenever I had to pee I dashed outside the circle, disarranged as few garments as absolutely necessary, did my business, and dashed back to the sleeping bag as fast as possible. The second time, I noticed that my first little puddle had frozen solid, so the temperature was somewhere below 32°. My plastic-wrapped cocoon was warm and comfortable, however, and I felt quite happy to be there. For all that I had always tended to avoid being alone as a continual state in life, I was content with my own company.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)