The Mindstorm Chronicles:
Chapter Three
A work of fiction? A work of non fiction? The work of insanity?
You decide.
It's hard to say precisely all of the factors that come into play over a lifetime that lead up to how someone thinks. Growing up in the mountains, with the nearest neighbors a couple of miles away, one learned to occupy their time with matters of imagination, more than anything else. So I began to pretend all kinds of things all of the time, building secret little fantasy worlds the way that kids sometimes do.
On the long trips back and forth between the mountains and the flatlands, we would be listening to the radio, playing with the -out the window, palm of the hand- aerodynamics as kids do, which led me into pretending that our little bug of a car was surrounded going down the road by some sort of tiny body guard aircraft from one of my childhood fantasies. But sometimes, once in a while, I thought of them as aliens, which wasn't the premise of my fantasy at all, but somehow felt fitting. And somehow reassuring. No big deal, just now and then my mind would wander that way for a few moments, only to begin to make my head hurt for not really knowing much about aliens. Well, or a whole lot else, which made me think about taking school a little more seriously. The prospect of going to school for years and years in order to really know anything at all seemed entirely daunting. Perhaps it was that thought that made me more observant of adults, and not only the things that they knew, but some of the things that they didn't know. Things about which having an education was no guarantee of knowing.
The old fox farm on top of the hill where we used to live was a surreal place. Besides the house, we had a barn, attached to which was a room with a potbelly stove and a vault for storing the fox furs. There were empty steel and wire cages outside, quite a few, that extended about a half a block out the back way, and for about a square block the other way. In the middle of the cages and fox runs, there was an enormous pine tree, and way, way, way up there was a tiny tree house that actually looked like a very tiny house with a shingle roof and a potbelly stove in it. From there, we supposed, a guard used to watch over everything at night. There was a big chopping block next to the room with the vault, which seemed a bit gruesome, but the room was useful for repairing rental toboggans in the winter time, and we would find new uses for the vault. It became our own little bomb shelter when the Cuban missile crisis was going on.
The Cuban missile crisis. Oh, God. We practiced duck and cover in school every day, sometimes. Twice a week usually. Well, at any given time everything was just over. That definitely had an impact on how I perceived the world. The world was crazy. One day, it could be, we would just see a bright light and everything would be over in a flash.
Then there was that thing that happened before the missile crisis. A bunch of dialog, come to think of it.
WWII had ended, the teacher said, when America developed a super bomb of some kind. She didn't go into too much detail about that, understandably, so neither did I. It was just a known fact that we had bigger bombs and that was all that I really knew. When I was talking to some of the voices in my head, and I didn't always ask who they were, I'd become curious about such things and would have to understand that, really, maybe I was just to young to know about such things. But I found out a whole lot more anyway, eventually, owing to explanations about why bomb shelters needed to be a certain way, and the kinds of problems that we might actually be facing. Somehow, crazy just didn't seem to be a strong enough word to describe the world.
But even at that time it seemed to me that, in essence, everyone was confused about war. One of the other kids did a display for a school project which had a very graphic battlefield slaying up close on it, something from some old war propaganda, and the teacher was a bit perturbed, and was telling the class how killingwas terrible. She seemed to stop and take inventory of our perplexed little faces before continuing, that it was also sometimes necessary. She looked around a bit more as we all sat silently looking on with tilted heads, then she continued to expand on those thoughts, much to my interest. I learned that not everybody agrees about war, and that at any given time, how the most people felt about a war would make all the difference in whether or not people wanted them, or thought they were necessary.
One day while I was just hanging out in the old barn (I always remember just where I was when these things happened), and I began to think about war very seriously, and had what was a really upsetting exchange which I don't really remember all that well. The aliens seemed to be of the firm opinion that all wars were fought for the money. And that disturbed me very deeply, it wasn't something that I would have thought. I couldn't have imagined such a thing in second grade. So we decided to have a meeting with the military and get right to the bottom of this. It was my idea.
Some military people were sort of saying, yeah, but if other people fight wars for money, somebody has to fight against them. The alien not only seemed unconvinced, but told the military people that they had intelligence problems that they weren't facing. The military people went nuts, the alien remained firm. I decided that I needed fresh air, and left the shady barn.
Really, at that point I was just tired of having these things happen to me. I was realizing how great it was to just be a kid and not to have to be a grown up yet. But the alien was reassuring, even if the military types were much less so, who I didn't really want to hear anymore and so I didn't, at first. Then I guess we decided to talk to them for a little while longer, and the military men were trying, at least, to be more civil. My position was that, if anybody would know what they were talking about it would be telepathic people, like these aliens, and that they should listen to them. At least listen and then find out what they could. They seemed to understand, even if they weren't exactly happy about any of this. In my minds eye, in a way that I couldn't really describe at all, I saw the military men all seated in a row at some table or something, and I saw one alien who was sort of standing, well more like hovering next to me. You know, like when something isjust really, really clear in your mind. Very real looking. Not like anything I'd ever experienced before.
These sorts of events became very depressing sometimes. I think I spent another three whole days being depressed over this one, to some extent or another. But by the end of the third day, I was always thinking about more pleasant things, things like comic books, or music, which was really beginning to capture my imagination because my older brother had just brought a bunch of new albums into the house with his new record player. The alien was still there, and we'd "think talk" about such things as I lay awake in the lower bunk, trying to forget how serious a place the world really must be. And he let me talk to all kinds of people, some of them were music people.
After those sorts of days I would begin my usual routine of long hikes with my dog, Laddie. And probably out of sheer boredom I began to ask myself questions about the forest, questions which eventually, even as a kid, had me in a state of wonder about how all these natural processes had combined to bring us such diversity of life itself. It was a wonder to me, for example, that nature never seemed to really waste anything.
Leaves didn't pile up because they became food for trees. To me, that explained more than I could really take in at the moment.
As time went by discussions often continued to get more serious, and I began to meet a whole lot of people telepathically. Though I had already convinced myself that speaking of such things wasn't in my best interest, I also thought it best to think about such things sometimes, but not give it too much importance either. It was all just too upsetting sometimes. But that didn't stop me from thinking about these things altogether. Eventually I would ask myself about that intelligence problem that the military was having, and the alien was never very far away if I ever wanted to talk about such things. And could put me in touch with anyone, apparently.
I don't really know how to describe the alien. In some ways he seemed like a really, really smart kid. In other ways he was very grown up, he wasn't at all afraid of standing up to those military men when they were upset and coming out of their chairs and using words that I never heard before.And insome ways, he seemed to really wonder about me more than I wondered about him. But I couldn't say why. I guess it was because I was both curious enough to want to know everything, and so unable to bear all of that that I generally avoided talking to him too much because it always led to things for which I was absolutely unprepared.
All the same, I was such a curious kid that I marveled at everything. Even small things, like how my dog could snap up a passing yellow jacket and spit him out without getting stung and then he would look curiously at the results. He was a great dog. Twice he saved me from rattlesnakes while we were headed out to hike. And in the very same spot.
We were just out the door and around the house when a rattler coiled right in front of me and was making that dreadful sound. I screamed bloody murder and my dog was all over that snake. The snake and the dog lunged back and forth at each other I don't know how many times. Back and forth, back and forth, while I continued to scream. My mother came out of the house and grabbed a shovel and after allowing the snake to strike at the shovel a few times, took off it's head. It happened twice in the same spot because, as we found out later, the snakes had made a nest in the little wooden box stuck in the ground that held some sort of valves for the sewage tank tank outside in our yard, and Lad and I just happened upon them as they were returning to their nest.
What a thing, I thought, that the my dog had risked his life for me. And I decided right then and there that I would do the same for him, if ever I had to. I was so relieved that he hadn't been bitten in the exchange, and so deeply respectful of his courage, and love, that our relationship grew considerably. The dog had won my love long before that, but now he also had my really profound appreciation, and my deep, deep respect.
My mother grew up on a farm, and she told me all about snakes. About how once when she was a little girl, she was walking in the corn field and stepped on one barefooted! She told me that it was a good thing that she was scared stiff, because she had put her foot down right behind the rattler's head, and had she moved she would have been bitten. She screamed and somebody came out with a shovel, and that's how she knew just what to do. She even knew how to skinthe snakes, and so twice I had the best things to bring toshow and tell. I kept those Diamond Back skins and rattles for years and years inside one of those plastic cases that protect cigarettes.
Living in the mountains could sure be boring. But some days were much more interesting than anything that happened in the flatlands, including TV. Like snakes. Or aliens. Or the true nature of dogs.
End Chapter Three
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