Ron Huber does a life-changing Vision Quest in New Mexico with Lee Few and Jesse "Lone Wolf" Hardin
August 19,1992. Wednesday. Off to New Mexico.
Manassas Park, Virginia. It's 2:30 on a hot cloudy afternoon. I'm slouching in my truck parked in front of Lee Few's apartment building, waiting for him to arrive from work.
Tomorrow morning we depart from Dulles Airport and fly to Albuquerque, where we (Lee) will rent a car to drive us to Reserve, New Mexico, where, somewhere in the vicinity, a trail leads to Wolf's lair.
Of course, all this depends on Lee actually appearing at his home. I have a nagging fear that somehow I have confused the4 date, and should have been here yesterday. If such is true, I may end up waiting fruitlessly for hours until Paula, his wife, shows up with the disturbing news. But I am sure that I have the dates correct.
August 20, 1992. Thursday. Indeed, t'was so. Writing from above the clouds as we wing our way west on United Airlines. Still rising, with a slight feel of vertigo it gives. Just aboard, so we won't be crossing the Appalachians.
Question: What shall take place at Lone Wolf's? My hopes are many, for I feel adrift. Unable to cope with the everyday mundanities of keeping a roof over Sami and my heads. And at the same time, given all the free time my unemployment allows, have I been busy and effective with things environmental? Not at all. Not at all.
Each golden opportunity has seemed to drop through my fingers, or else I weaken and fail to fulfill leadership jobs I have claimed as mine, from old forest protection in Maryland's Appalachians to fighting oil drillers on the Bay's tributaries.
It is stick-to-it-iveness that I have a lack of. I ask for leadership positions, yet fail to carry them out for one reason or another: poverty-confusion-fear?
I've been blaming a depressive cycle of my manic depressive ailment for this: can't concentrate, hence can't finish my articles, campaigns, proposals or at least do a very poor job at 'em. Maybe...maybe not.
Examine the issue. What unfulfilled tasks have we got in mind? I water pollution article...hey, not that much. The tree action.
Now we're heading south from Denver Colorado on a 737.The cities’ cancer patches have fallen behind and surprisingly forests cover the twisted and folded lands. But logging roads everywhere, some like demented drawings scribbled on the landscape. A great ugly town in a valley, then more folded lands. Somehow, flying over these places, viewing lazily from my seat is a cheapening sensation--"is that all there is?" To see a mountain in its totality, to have the birds' view.
We fly over the Sangre de Cristos, the pilot informs us, and a great circle of sand dunes appropriately known as Dunes National Monument.
We fly alongside a thunder head, amidst a flurry of cumulus. Anvil-shaped, like a flattened nuclear explosion Below, green sparse forest.
The weatherbeaten man with yellow billed cap, fierce eyes, and long grey beard, clutching a jug of wine, he was a fellow passenger.
Meanwhile. we've arrived. Albuquerque, a name I'm still unable to spe3ll consistently, is stretched along a river, slow and silty looking--the Rio Grande! A grand site it must have been to thirsty travelers crossing the Sangre de Christo mountains, to see the long thin oasis, stretching on to Mexico in the midst of a broad dry valley. We hire a car.
August 21, 1992 Friday
In the morning a lazy awakening, then down to the icy water for a quick bath. Later, Lee and I journeyed, first climbing a rocky boulderstrewn wash about ½ mile to where an overhang portended where a waterfall would be, after much rain. This, said Wolf earlier in the day, was a power place, though I felt it not, myself.
We retraced our way back down the wash to the River. A tall forested hill, or small mountain, beckoned on the other side. We splashed across, and espied a deepish hole where swimming, or at least a good dunking awaited our return.
As we went up, first brambly (no thorns) and a gentle slope to a first shelf. Started noticing elk trails going with the contour of the mountain. Should we get on them? Lee thought not, as the track did not go up si much as around the slope, so we did not , rather going straight up. A second shelf, and the mountain then surged steeply up to the summit. At first we did some elk trails, discovering they did switch back and forth, but abandoned them to go straight up the last hundred meters so the oblong flat top.
On our return, we went sloshing up stream a 100 yards or so to the swimming place, frightening 100s of minnows who darted to one side or the other fleeing or heavy tread. A brown algae forms a delicate net over rocks in the quiet parts of the stream. As it decays, it is eaten by the tiny fish perhaps.
The soak was delightful as we lay immersed in the moving waters. Not to cold, nor warm. Just...perfect.
August 22 1992, Saturday
Having studied altered states of consciousness, I note that this is called the hypnagogic state, a state of consciousness studied for its telepathic potential. I remember the "warning": that entities were known to prowl in this realm, which rather bears up Wolf's assertion. This should be splendid! Lone wolf says many centuries of ancient people here have left their mental mark on the place, so their should be a fascinating couple days .
After getting up, I brushed teeth, rinsed nostrils, and walked and climbed down to the shore, escorted by a cat. Cool and cloudy. A short stint of rain last night. I walked one half mile down stream where I can see the cliffs, layers of volcanic strata covered with tough pine trees wherever the cliff face is not sheer. It is difference colors: dull orange, then below that pale purple.
VISION QUEST
How describe those four nights-days of the vision quest? A pastiche is best, as timeless, clockless, sleepless, meal less, I was cut off from the chronosphere of clocks, etc.
Some things loom larger than others, so those I'll address first; in brevity, then greater depth later. The niche in the place where the cliff turned, packed with sand, a grand sitting place were it not raining; the flat rock in the open, broad enough to sprawl on, with a withered log and a row of stones blocking the dropoffs.
And the cave....
I found the cave going up , the trance-like awareness lending and immediacy of place to what occurred, over the length of the journey to it along the upward slope of the cliff face.
After discovering the sand bench, I looked up into what appeared to be a cut in the cliff face completely filled with massive sheared off blocks of mixed rock and tufa. But there were crevices, and up one I espied a black stain in the upper reaches of the fallen-in boulders, and, finding ways to clamber up the rock, it became, to a heart-stopping degree a stand-in-able and bone dry environment. and immediately I saw them -- in toward the back of the chamber-- a row of tiny corn cobs leaning on a dry bough. The old people....sacredness!
I brought up my stuff, and the heave of the blanket up disturbed the row of corncobs, but as I eventually learned, Wolf collected them from the cave interior and put them on the rock anyway.
But then I saw IT--the writing on the wall-- a drawn wolf on the wall in red paint? that felt and looked terribly old, markedly eroded by dust in the cave over the centuries, with lightning zig zagging its way up and out of its mouth. Above it was a long line of mostly vertical dashes stretching across the wall of the cave. It was on a smooth flat surface still holding paint, a good seven feet, it seemed.
I let out a cry of delight, found myself bowing worshipfully at it, then felt silly, like.."hey! we've barely met! We'll see."
The floor was very important in the tall narrow cave, for it was a big dry pool of centuries of accumulated dust, packrat droppings and tiny dried stickers, ancient yet still very sharp and very penetrating, like harpoons, each 1/4 inch and barbed in a way that made them come out grudgingly when yanked out. There were therein the thousands, and the three to ten inch bed of this combined effluvia was an important part of life there. I wonder in retrospect if the early peoples here no doubt kept the cave rat- and duff-less.
Anyway, to sit or lie down in this cave is to sit in and on this duff and you're immediately greeted with the spinys.
I sang quite a bit in the cave, and it was be different chants or prayers or religions at different times. It is a way to slip out of thought, to let, as Wolf had suggested, the thoughts roll through and past and die down of their own accord, freeing your YOU to spread your focus of attention out, synaesthesia merging of smell sight sound and touch into a sort of GROK of the cave, ceaseless background wash of the river, ever changing, ever so slightly.
But always, useless strands of memory, like tape loops of things for me mostly refrains from music significant to me, would phase in, as they always do, leading to a train of thought starting up and I'd shake my head and drop off the chain of thought, sometimes by silence, and letting it roll past.
Funny, but while the wolf drawing had the patina of its ancientness on it, I felt no wolfishness about it, no power of fierce indomitability or other yang wildness. Just awe.
Above the rattler, a piece of the cave's inner face had broken away in the shape of a fish, a great powerful looking fish, about the size and shape of a great fat cod or other fish. A barbel or whisker on its chin.
It became a major feature of my time there, looking at and into it, and even reverently and with a sense of helping the fish, I sprinkled water into his mouth - but only a tiny amount to keep it from running down into the red drawings below. The fish's tail was longer on the lower fork of the fin
Rainy day faded into rainy night and I felt the chill come on and the damp, and began experimenting with the blanket. The omnipresent spinys easily and unpleasantly penetrated the single lay of the blanket, a think wool one, as soon as I set hand, body or foot down. Yet they couldn't really be in combed out from beneath for they were there by the tens of thousands integrated in with the pack rat droppings, equally dried out.
It was this, I realized eroding and falling apart through time, that made the dust that rose in the air at the slightest touch. Stretched out, I wrapped myself, shroud style, the blanket wrapped, sandwiched over and below me and cordoned off at the edges.
But those prickers! Moving ever so slightly to get away from one jab just brought you into contact with other ones. Until you picked them off and when they were all picked away, when like me, you rotate your body as each contact point gets uncomfortable, to another one, you stir out more prickles...well shucks, a good way to keep from sleeping, hey?
For always the urge to sleep, to rest in the final unconsciousness that concludes our every day, was there, and I am sure that I succumbed many times, briefly through the four days and four nights I was there.
And the ceaseless soft roar of the river all times reaching, even into the cave, day and night the undertone overtone of it all. River! I screamed at the roaring flood of translucent brown water. I can't hear you! I can't hear you! As I tried to lose my hearing senses into the water, I kept failing. Kept over voices running through my head. It is only in internal silences that full hearing can come.
There was that good old hypnagogic reverie state to slip into and barely , not often , I putting myself into it by back counting breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth, that can bring me by pre-relaxed yawning state in ten or twenty seconds.
But it was that trance which was slipped into quite unnoticeably that was most fruitful, for drawn into the fish I would sense that my worldline could/should go that way, that my future lay more with the sea than the dry lands or forests, fighting to protect the great schools of predators that travel the banks along, beyond the coasts. That, too, prowl restlessly near the shore, just below the tide line.
The victims of the longlines, the sharks finned and dumped overboard writhing in agony, the shad clustering in annual convocation off Maryland, raided by seiners, the shrimpers off the Carolinas with their by catches and general mayhem. The silt and waste waters of the coastal developers. Their herbicides and pesticides tincturing the shallows with Death.
Help me! spoke Marine Nature. Can you not see?
And I saw: that this was the way for me to go, not the mountain way. The water way. Tidal way. Getting aboard with Bob Levangie's Marine Protection Alliance on Penobscot Bay where the cod, the seals and the whales roam. For if I didn't do this now when Called, but remained shackled to my little house in Maryland, then WHEN?
In return of dawn I found by going to the mouth of the cave I saw I could crawl into a little horizontal slot that I could fit in but not sit up in. I lay down in it and had a broad vista. The clouds at sunrise; never colored, surprisingly. No vivid reds, oranges or such. Only grays coming from black, til colors of green emerged.
The visage of a sperm whale formed on the cliff face opposite: face choking, gaping open mouth with effluvium pouring in and out, black rock rising out of tufa with white spot of eye. It has an expression of rage or helplessness: all this trash! he was saying, glaring at me.
Okay! Okay! I promised them of the baleen, whose strainers were clogged with plastic bits, I will try to end that menace too!
Respect respect! Lee says. I am frankly tired at this stage and time of his talking; I get drawn out of my relationship with this Place. For that is what I am here for: to be with and of this place, not rehashing old times.
But ah...Lee sleeps. More quick shots:
The river going wide and red as eroded soils chock it from above, from white noise to road. The evergreen tree dominates vision from the cave.
The talus slope of tremendous and tiny boulders and rocks and sands, full of cacti and scrawny shrubs and Spanish bayonet, some soft flat leaved plants, sloping to the flood plain below, where sand and gravel fall to the river, rising ramp-like to the top of cliff.
The sweat of unbearable steams, with sage and copal alternating each round. Lee fleeing the first round at the second or third splash of water on the hot glowing rocks. The steam so suddenly scalding face and shoulders unless one leaned low, even then roasting the shoulder left up, for the lodge was tiny, very cramped. The steam got you right away--Lee called it "Dragon's Breath".
Sawing wood for the sweat, exhausting, on the first day of fasting. Waiting until late at night to light it off, making wolf worry when he looked out at night from his lair and saw no flame, but we started late, fearing to burn up all the wood before wolf came.
The hummingbirds whirring around the outer cave, pausing on sticks outside it to chirp double chirps.
The patient long-billed prober bird, often upside down as he or she worked along the crevices, leaping with a quick burst of flapping from rock to rock above me. [Canyon wren]
Big cautious ground squirrels on the talus below. Crane-like birds flying up the river.
Water bottle that held increasingly bitter water till I couldn't drink it on the last day.
Lizards doing pushups to keep from burning their bellies.
The view of the next cliff down from the slot, and if I looked around, part of Wolf's house and bus, which view I tried to avoid.
Swimming between sweat rounds, weird eyed, profoundly grateful for the cooling waters on burnt shoulders and hot head. Naked.
Lee and I's final round alone, Wolf handing me a piece of copal through the door, I doling out little dabs of water at a time then once too much, for the gust of steam sent Lee out the door and I followed a splash later.
Staggering up into the Unknown with blanket, vest, shirt, pants, shoes, socks on, water jug, Lee close behind as we scramble the first hundred feet through the lowland thickets, then I wending left, never looking back, slipping on the gravel, climbing boulders, up, always up.
The roof of the cave, great vertical slabs wedged together sometimes like to many swords of Damocles, but not really dangerous looking.
Violet tufa like a fat pinkish layer of petrified raisin pudding, topped by solid lava.
My chants and pleas for guidance and courage, my endless analyses of life options: EF! Journal, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, marine Protection Alliance, getting Sami to Japan to act as that end of a soy chip distribution network and to see her family and secure her inheritance; living with ma and pa and getting the Montaigne Foundation/corporation to do the importing. Any and all of these. Dealing with Christina to buy the Blue Ghost....a host of potentials wandered my cranium one night.
Getting late. I shall sleep. Tomorrow afternoon we shall leave this place.
Next morning. Stretch awake, my mind quickly turns to the matter at hand. A few mumbles and grunts (Lee has packed up in the interregnum) I gathering junk together and head out to redemption. And it is so. The mountain gives forth a gift from its gully.
Back through the wide shallow panne of Wolf's domain, his old sweat ring, little arroyos, all tree covered, sunk comfortably beneath the stratified cliffs and yet above the flood plain.
To return to the cave: There I tried not to disturb, through shifting about to avoid the omnipresent prickers. Knocked down the corn cobs. Broke some, even. But all the cobs and pieces are back leaning against the bough now...
August 28, 1992. Saturday morning 1:23 a.m.
Dern if the fellow didn't annoy me greatly after my return from the fast, with his bloody vision of apocalyptic earth ruled by bands of armed men pillaging and raping their way through the centuries His is strongly a control personality type, and can always be counted on to come up with a damned-if-you-do sort of anecdote. Much misanthropism, misogyny and something else fill this extraordinary man, prey to the somatic vices and as we leave Wolfland and re-enter western tech, he embraces it most wholeheartedly, the radio blaring, air conditioner on, talk and thoughts utterly external to what we had just left behind...EERIE. Maybe his bolting the sweat in the first round and each next round shamed him, as did his terminating the vision quest early with a worsening back pain, so that perhaps he wants to rush it into the past.
But not I, who need to draw deeper into this biocentric metaphysic, not more distant. I have promises to keep....
In this hotel, this Holiday Inn late at night, I took a shower, mixed feelings as the patina of Wolf land sluiced away, to be replaced with sweetish techno scent of shampoo, soap.
Clean, yet tainted, in this third floor box in Santa Fe, a town that flamed with hundreds of lights as we descended to it, like Albuquerque earlier, glowing cancer dimming the heavens. Always the same: same stores, TV newspaper, traffic, cops office blobs et al. Back where "watch your back!" is more important than "watch your step!"
Wolfland is more of the geologic time, biologic epicycles skittering along it. Still feel the stony chill of the medici
A first splendid morning at Wolf home. Many dreams last night, though now they've slipped beyond recall.
Second morning. Today we begin our preparations for the vision quest. A final breakfast, then preparation for the sweat. Tonight shall be up all night, then into the next few days, no sleep, for as Wolf describes it, the aim is to remain in a half wake, half sleep state, where the spirit beings can communicate with one.
In a Santa Fe hotel room. lee rented it a short while ago. He cut short our visit to Wolf-land to go north to Santa Fe for a day and a half to tourist-shop, of all things, before we return to Albuquerque to fly east again.