Foraging: Part II

In a canyon west of Boulder Colorado, Meg eased Allen's Volkswagen down a rutted road dogging the course of a noisy brook.  The lane crossed and re-crossed the stream several times over a series of decaying log bridges, then as if bored by water, it veered sharply toward a lush meadow to vanish amid the blue haze hovering over an encampment of hippies.

Allen and Meg arrived early when the canyon still rested in the shadows of night.  Only the high western rim glowed red with sunlight yet the camp had stirred hours ago with people busying themselves doing morning chores.  Some were cooking breakfast; others trudged toward the stream swinging empty buckets.  Children ran everywhere chasing each other naked in the morning chill, their shrieks bouncing off the canyon walls.

Following the lane into the meadow, Meg steered her way through a jumble of transient architecture.  There were, of course, the obligatory converted buses and postal vans painted in day-glow primary colors but also dispersed among these, and the teepees,  tents and yurts was a back-lot chaos of set-designer fantasies: castles with parapets, white washed pagodas, mountain-men lean-to's and medieval campaign tents flying colorful pennants.  The theme of the camp was festival, a place where people could be anything but what the world outside expected of them.

After a bit of searching, Meg set the brake next to a fanciful wooden camper built upon the chassis of old International Harvest truck.  It sported a curved roof of cedar shakes, wooden steps that swung down on a hinge and two wrought iron lanterns hanging over a rounded back door. 

A canvas awning had been rigged off one-side of the camper to provide shade and shelter for an outdoor shop where a cabinet maker focused on his task.  The guy wore long hair, streaked with age, a battered top hat, a suit coat and matching pants, but he wore no shoes, socks or shirt.  He was not oblivious to Allen and Meg, but valued their arrival less then the details of his work. Despite their presence, he continued to caress the wood with his hands and tools, constantly testing its form against an ideal that appeared to exist only for an instant of time.

"Hey Megan" he said finally, revealing something of the weight of history.

"Hey Amos, is Gwynne around?"

He pointed to a tall thin woman balancing two pails on a wooden yoke, in animated conversation with a knot of people by the stream.

"GWYNNE!"

The woman dumped her pails on the ground, spread her arms, and rushed toward the caravan crying "MEGAN!!" She swept Meg into her arms and spun her around kissing her like a mother reunited with a child.

After introducing Allen, and some general chit-chat, the two women went into the camper to plan an extravagant reunion dinner.  Meg made it clear from the beginning that Gwynne's chore was to draw up a list of everything required for the feast - and that Megan would provide.  

The old guy ignored them, continuing to work and only occasionally stopped to eye Allen, who abandoned by the women, drifted toward the propped up truck hood where engine parts spilled over the fender onto a drop-cloth.

When they emerged, the women exchanged a series of glances as Meg notified Amos to expect a few extra people for supper.

"How many?"

"Don't know yet" Meg told him.

Then she announced that she was going foraging.  Allen was to entertain himself.

***

Allen passed time with Amos, who passed time ignoring Allen.  Finally out of boredom he gestured toward the open hood of the truck, "Mind if I take a look?  We went through a couple of these "cornbinders" back home."

Amos motioned in disgust toward the engine, a sign that he didn't give a damn what Allen did with the thing.  It was the opening Allen needed and for first time since he met Meg he felt in his own element.  He moved among the disassembly, sifting and organizing, running his hands among the parts like a raccoon picking amid a garbage pile.  He envisioned the task until he knew he could do what he wanted to do with the engine, then fetched his toolbox from the Volkswagen and claimed a spot under the awning alongside Amos.

The two worked in silence as the sun slowly tilted shadows and thickened the air with the fragrance of warming pine.  The warmth woke the last of the sleepers, and the everyday festival, began another day.

Gradually, over the course of the afternoon Allen brought form to the engine.  He had spent most of his time rebuilding the carburetor: a thing which Amos acknowledged was a traditional source of the truck's problems.  Amos had grown disgusted with the brass and gaskets he could never get right, things that defied his tactile ability to mold and sculpt.  For Allen these unyielding objects were things to be understood and tuned; he was not an artisan like Amos, instead he looked at the world as a place to be comprehended rather than created.

By mid-afternoon, he had the engine purring.  Amos was both impressed and grateful.  Allen felt that he had made a friend, so he asked Amos point-blank.

"Tell me about Meg."

"What do you want to know?"

"I just feel there is a lot that I can learn from her but I really don't know much about her other than what she tells me, which isn't a lot."

"I doubt you could learn much that you would want to use.  Megan is a very different person.  She knows people the way the old Arapaho knew buffalo and elk.  Those people loved their prey.  They lived with them, revered them as ancestors, but they also killed and consumed them.  If I were you, I'd stay with things mechanical."

"There is no magic in what I do, not like the stuff Meg talks about.  She's studied magic all over the world.  You can see it in the way she deals with people.  She has gift, a power.  I want a piece of that."

"She is talented.  In any other time, in any other place Meg would have been a shaman, curing the village and warding off fears.  She would have worked miracles, providing warriors with talismans that deflect warheads, but that is dead.  Now people like Meg work in advertising to hustle sugar snacks and perfume."

Allen nodded.

"That is why Meg is attracted to you."

"That's crazy?"

"Think about your magic: -- engines, machine-tools, cars, antibiotics, we no longer need miracles and water turned into wine - we no longer need people like Meg.  And that is what all these wandering hippies are about, a quest for old magic."

"That does not explain why Meg is attracted to me?"

"The same reason you are attracted to her; she wants a piece of what you have.  Neither of you are going to get what you want.  She has no more ability to get it from you than you have to get a piece of what she has from her.  Stick with what you have."

"You're quite a philosopher Amos."

"I should be, I taught Philosophy down the hill for 18 years - now I work with wood."

***

About two o'clock Meg returned leading a small train of college kids from Illinois whom she had conned into picking up supplies in town in exchange for supper.  Her pack animals consisted of a bookish kid named Dale, and his buddies, a force of nature known collectively as "The Boys".

The Boys swarmed into the campsite and began tossing around a football on a stretch of gravel by the camper.  After bouncing a couple of long passes off a teepee, snapping a cloth-line in pursuit of an over-throw, and running a stampede of dogs and goats through nearby campsites, the neighbors chased them into the encampment common where they swirled like colts bursting out of a pen.  Finally, Gwynne had to round them up and send them off into the hillside to gather firewood and carry water, tasks they made a mess of by turning to play.  Only Dale, stayed in the campsite, off by himself, absorbed in a book he had picked up in Boulder that afternoon.

The evening brought supper under the light of candles and stars.  Gwynne baked bread fresh that day and the boys provided a couple bottles of Chianti.  Dale brought enough rice and veggies from the co-op to circulate several courses: and so they lingered pleasantly over dinner; swapping stories and jokes until late in the evening.  

Dinner was enough for most; but the boys got antsy as the night progressed, whining and nagging that they wanted to get high to wander the canyon but there seemed to be some secret shared by Meg, Gwynne and Dale holding them at bay.

After supper Gwynne requested that everyone be still and listen to the wind blowing clouds high over the canyon. They sat in silence looking up at a black sky pierced with white hot stars.

"Why don't you tell all the boys where we met?"

Megan chuckled at Gwynne, "I met this skinny thing on the Hippie Trail; en-route from Istanbul to New Delhi.  If you guys think about getting high, that is where you want to be."

A couple of the boys tittered.

Gwynne drained the last of a bottle of Chianti, laughing at some memory she shared with Meg "Tell them about Gene and the Buddha's of Bamiyan."

Meg's eyes sparkled "Well, we got this really good hash in Tabriz in Iran that we hide inside the skin of a football.   Moslem border guards won't touch pig skin; anyway, we reached Afghanistan and rode an old jitney bus to the Bamiyan Valley.  Bamiyan used to a center on the Silk Road.  It is where the caravans traveling between China and the Roman Empire stopped, thousands of years ago, to rest and trade.  The people of Bamiyan carved huge statues of Buddha into the face of a sandstone cliff.  They are said to be sacred.

The best opium in the world is grown in the Bamiyan Valley and legend has it that if you smoke opium with hashish while meditating before the statues, the Buddha will awake and answer a single question."

Meg hesitated until one of the boys asked "Wow, so what did you ask?"

"I'm not telling - but I will tell you what happened to Gene." 

"Gene was a lovable guy but a real burn-out.  He smoked more than most thought humanly possible before sitting with the Buddha.  It was a night like this, warm with a wind high overhead, and the sky sparked with stars.  Gene unfurled his prayer rug, cleared his mind and the Buddha opened its eyes, starring right at Gene."

She paused again eliciting a chorus of "cool"

"Like I said, Gene was a sweet guy but real crisp, when the Buddha awoke, he perked up, blurting out, ‘How ya doing man?' The Buddha blinked at him and answered his once in a lifetime question with the single word ‘Great', then closed its eyes and returned to an eternity of sleep."

That cracked everyone up.

Meg didn't laugh; instead she stared down the boys to quiet them then pulled out a small square of aluminum foil.

"This is the last of my sacred stash.  Tell them what the deal is, Dale"

Dale turned to his friends.

"She told me the story this afternoon; she even dropped me by the University library to look up Tabriz and the Buddha's of Bamiyan.  It is all real --- and she gave me just a pinch of the stuff - it's really good!!"

"Go on Dale"

"She wants $50 a piece from each of us for the last gram."

"That's like $200!! What a rip!"

"How much is it worth to have the most important question of your life answered?" she asked them.  "This mix of hash and opium is sacred.  You don't have the Buddha here but you can climb high enough up that mountain to see the moonlight play on the snows of Estes Park, a place sacred to the Arapaho.  If you ask the right question and ask it honestly, it will be answered.  You can't put a price on that."

Dale's nod finalized the deal.

After the boys left to go up the mountain, Allen and Meg cleared the table, feeding the remains of dinner to a pot bellied pig that had waited anxiously in the dark.  Meg looked up at the mountainside, then at the stars burning blue overhead "That is how to turn a $20 hit of Moroccan Kif into an existential journey, net $200 and enjoy a free meal to boot.

I do believe that we have changed some lives tonight."

Allen agreed.

Later despite a good supper, good wine, good feelings and a wind stirring the pines, Amos and Gwynne, fighting some tired fight, hissed and clawed at each other through the night.

This is the second in a three part serial story.

Foraging: Part I

Foraging: Part III

© Greg Schiller, 2007
Author: Greg Schiller