of Taverns and Snowflakes
~ Focusing Emptiness ~
Of Taverns and Snowflakes
I
t never really got what you would call “hot” in the mountains, not like it did in the valley below, but in the winter it definitely got cold, and the snow would fall so hard you couldn’t see more than fifty feet. Crestline was a resort town nestled into the San Bernardino mountains. We found a beautiful two-story, cabin-like mountain house overlooking the valley, a rustic place with pine paneled walls and a huge fireplace in a spacious living room. We could afford it because it was on government land. Most people didn’t want a house on government land because the government could theoretically boot you off it at any time. We got it cheap. My step-sisters and brother and I were all farmed out to our respective schools on the mountain, installing me at the Rim-O-theWorld Junior High about twenty miles away. But I wasn’t doing well there. As long as I could remember I was in trouble when it came to school…any school. In grade school, in Redlands, I was defiant to the point of driving my teachers to extremes, pushing one to her breaking point. She tied my hands behind my back with a jump rope and sat me on a chair facing into the corner of the room for most of the day. No matter where I went, and I was shuffled around to an assortment of schools, things weren’t much different. I fought learning to read, I refused to do homework of any kind, I didn’t show up at school for days on end, and when I did, I was as defiant and disruptive as possible. Looking back now, I can see that my efforts were really a misguided form of protection, which soon transcended boundaries to include pretty much any authority figure at all. Why? I didn’t know. The small resort community of Crestline catered to vacationers from the valley below who came to swim in the nearby lake, or ski at Big Bear. There was an ice-skating rink in the middle of town and lots of houses and businesses with alpine looks. But Crestline was actually
26
~ C h a p t e r o n e : B l u r o f Fa n ta s y ~
quite isolated. There were several other houses near ours but they were summer homes, rarely used. Most of the population were visitors; strangers who came up for a few days during the summer to swim, or in the winter to ski, then left. On the surface, Crestline was an enchanted resort area, and for the tourists and summer home owners, that may have actually been the case. But for the residents, things were different. Community life revolved around its bars, especially during the winter months when most everything else was snowed in. That didn’t help my out-of-work stepfather who already had a drinking problem. For him, things were going steadily downhill. When we got home from school, we often found him lying passed out in the middle of our living room floor naked. Since he wasn’t making money, Mom had to take a job as a cocktail waitress, but that didn’t bring in much. The situation was rapidly deteriorating, with us kids just trying to stay out of the way, mostly by disengaging from the grown-up’s problems. We had plenty of our own problems without getting drawn into theirs. But while this sort of disengagement served us well during these early days, it would not serve us so well many years later when we disengaged from our mother, and each other, often when we needed engagement the most. My room now was in a remodeled basement underneath the main floor of the house. I was alone down there, distanced from the rest of the family, but I could hear most of what was going on above me. The fighting between Mom and Dad never really stopped and I was jarred awake one evening by a huge crash. It was obvious they were at it again. This time seemed worse than usual, and worried me more than the others. I was about thirteen by now, and still tasked with saving my mother when these fights got out of hand. I was supposed to call the police, but there was no phone in my room. The only phone was upstairs, and I couldn’t get to it without walking right into the middle of their mess. Not knowing what else to do, I slipped a pair
27
~ Focusing Emptiness ~
of thin rubber boots over my bare feet, grabbed a long sleeved shirt, which was the warmest thing I had in my room, and slipped out my window into the snow outside. There was no moon that night, so it was really dark, and I sank nearly up to my hips in the snow as I exited my window. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning, and it was windy and well below freezing. I wished I had a coat, but I didn’t. I had to get to a phone, and the only one I knew of was in the town of Crestline, a mile or so away through the forest. So I set off through the snow to find it, thinking it would be better to cut through the woods than to stick to the road. It was snowing heavily, making it difficult to see, and as soon as my adrenaline subsided I began feeling the terror of being in the woods alone in the dark. I probably should have stuck to the road but there were no lights there either, so maybe it wouldn’t have made much difference. One way or another it was going to be frightening journey, but things were made much worse when my old fantasies of werewolves resurfaced. If only I had a flashlight, or a knife…anything. And the cold was now beginning to push through my rubber boots. It had already made it through my shirt. Deep into the woods now I could see an eerie bluish green light streaming through the forest trees up ahead. The light was coming from a house near the road, another one of those vacation houses with a timer night-light installed. The light made little sense. Everyone knew no one was home. The light filtered through a bluishgreen window shade, then through the falling snow and pine trees, lending a ghostly hue to the forest. I could hardly look at it, or at the shadows it cast into the trees around me as I sank my rubber boots into the crusty snow. But off in the distance, I spotted a shadowy, backlit figure silhouetted by the bluish light behind it. Whatever it was, it was headed directly toward me. My breathing stopped as a feeling of absolute horror came over me. Whatever it was coming toward me, it couldn’t have come at
28
~ C h a p t e r o n e : B l u r o f Fa n ta s y ~
a worse time. I was already on the edge, and now this. But for the bluish light up ahead, there was nothing but blackness and trees and snow surrounding me and a deafening silence broken only by the sound of my own heart pounding up through my neck. “Oh God,” I thought, as the animal came closer, and for an instant, the gap between my world of light and the darkness of my attic was breached and I was inside its darkness, with its rafters, and nails not quite pounded in… alone and helpless without even my covers to pull over my head. The animal was nearly upon me when suddenly the backlight of the bluish hue gave way and I could see clearly…that it was Poncho! “Jesus Christ!” I yelled, falling to my knees in the snow. Once again, Poncho had found me, no doubt travelling the road at first, getting out ahead before spotting me in the forest behind him. I was shaken, but knew now that I would be all right. So we continued on together, passing the house with the blue-green light, and moving forward through the snow. It wasn’t much farther before I could see the outskirts of town. I moved back onto the road, which dropped sharply in a curved arc leading into town, and I could see the gas station on the corner ahead. The phone booth was there. I was slipping on the ice as I made my way down the steeply sloping road into town, and the cold was now coming through my rubber boots freely, biting at my feet. Soon I was closing myself into the phone booth. The rest of the town was dark. Shaking from the cold, I should have called the police, but instead, I called my grandmother in the valley below, who told me to stay put while they drove up to get me. So, sliding beneath one of the cars parked outside the gas station, I waited. I don’t remember how we got back up our steep driveway that night, whether we drove or walked it. It seems like we must have walked it, but one of my mother’s friends often came over with his miniature snowplow to clear the driveway for us every now and then, so maybe we drove. Anyway, by the time we got home, Mom had
29
~ Focusing Emptiness ~
cleaned herself up as best as she could. My grandparents had phoned the house prior to our arrival so she knew they were coming and tried to make it look like it was only a small fight. It turned out later that the crash I had heard was Mom throwing our television set at my stepfather after he had knocked one of her teeth loose and had given her a black eye. Mom tried to laugh the whole thing off but it wasn’t easy through her black eye and swollen lip. It took a few more months of this sort of thing before Mom finally kicked my stepfather out for good. But finally, finally… he was gone, and there was a block of time when things were calm, though Mom was struggling to make ends meet. My stepfather boasted for many years that he “never gave her a dime of child support,” despite the court order. How he could have boasted about that to me was a mystery. It was my sisters, my brother, and I who were the ones hurt. But at least now there was peace and quiet, and my sisters could put their effort into trying to fit into the local social scene on the mountain instead of trying not to trip over a drunk passed out in the middle of the living room floor.
30
Of Taverns and Snowflakes
I
t never really got what you would call “hot” in the mountains, not like it did in the valley below, but in the winter it definitely got cold, and the snow would fall so hard you couldn’t see more than fifty feet. Crestline was a resort town nestled into the San Bernardino mountains. We found a beautiful two-story, cabin-like mountain house overlooking the valley, a rustic place with pine paneled walls and a huge fireplace in a spacious living room. We could afford it because it was on government land. Most people didn’t want a house on government land because the government could theoretically boot you off it at any time. We got it cheap. My step-sisters and brother and I were all farmed out to our respective schools on the mountain, installing me at the Rim-O-theWorld Junior High about twenty miles away. But I wasn’t doing well there. As long as I could remember I was in trouble when it came to school…any school. In grade school, in Redlands, I was defiant to the point of driving my teachers to extremes, pushing one to her breaking point. She tied my hands behind my back with a jump rope and sat me on a chair facing into the corner of the room for most of the day. No matter where I went, and I was shuffled around to an assortment of schools, things weren’t much different. I fought learning to read, I refused to do homework of any kind, I didn’t show up at school for days on end, and when I did, I was as defiant and disruptive as possible. Looking back now, I can see that my efforts were really a misguided form of protection, which soon transcended boundaries to include pretty much any authority figure at all. Why? I didn’t know. The small resort community of Crestline catered to vacationers from the valley below who came to swim in the nearby lake, or ski at Big Bear. There was an ice-skating rink in the middle of town and lots of houses and businesses with alpine looks. But Crestline was actually
26
~ C h a p t e r o n e : B l u r o f Fa n ta s y ~
quite isolated. There were several other houses near ours but they were summer homes, rarely used. Most of the population were visitors; strangers who came up for a few days during the summer to swim, or in the winter to ski, then left. On the surface, Crestline was an enchanted resort area, and for the tourists and summer home owners, that may have actually been the case. But for the residents, things were different. Community life revolved around its bars, especially during the winter months when most everything else was snowed in. That didn’t help my out-of-work stepfather who already had a drinking problem. For him, things were going steadily downhill. When we got home from school, we often found him lying passed out in the middle of our living room floor naked. Since he wasn’t making money, Mom had to take a job as a cocktail waitress, but that didn’t bring in much. The situation was rapidly deteriorating, with us kids just trying to stay out of the way, mostly by disengaging from the grown-up’s problems. We had plenty of our own problems without getting drawn into theirs. But while this sort of disengagement served us well during these early days, it would not serve us so well many years later when we disengaged from our mother, and each other, often when we needed engagement the most. My room now was in a remodeled basement underneath the main floor of the house. I was alone down there, distanced from the rest of the family, but I could hear most of what was going on above me. The fighting between Mom and Dad never really stopped and I was jarred awake one evening by a huge crash. It was obvious they were at it again. This time seemed worse than usual, and worried me more than the others. I was about thirteen by now, and still tasked with saving my mother when these fights got out of hand. I was supposed to call the police, but there was no phone in my room. The only phone was upstairs, and I couldn’t get to it without walking right into the middle of their mess. Not knowing what else to do, I slipped a pair
27
~ Focusing Emptiness ~
of thin rubber boots over my bare feet, grabbed a long sleeved shirt, which was the warmest thing I had in my room, and slipped out my window into the snow outside. There was no moon that night, so it was really dark, and I sank nearly up to my hips in the snow as I exited my window. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning, and it was windy and well below freezing. I wished I had a coat, but I didn’t. I had to get to a phone, and the only one I knew of was in the town of Crestline, a mile or so away through the forest. So I set off through the snow to find it, thinking it would be better to cut through the woods than to stick to the road. It was snowing heavily, making it difficult to see, and as soon as my adrenaline subsided I began feeling the terror of being in the woods alone in the dark. I probably should have stuck to the road but there were no lights there either, so maybe it wouldn’t have made much difference. One way or another it was going to be frightening journey, but things were made much worse when my old fantasies of werewolves resurfaced. If only I had a flashlight, or a knife…anything. And the cold was now beginning to push through my rubber boots. It had already made it through my shirt. Deep into the woods now I could see an eerie bluish green light streaming through the forest trees up ahead. The light was coming from a house near the road, another one of those vacation houses with a timer night-light installed. The light made little sense. Everyone knew no one was home. The light filtered through a bluishgreen window shade, then through the falling snow and pine trees, lending a ghostly hue to the forest. I could hardly look at it, or at the shadows it cast into the trees around me as I sank my rubber boots into the crusty snow. But off in the distance, I spotted a shadowy, backlit figure silhouetted by the bluish light behind it. Whatever it was, it was headed directly toward me. My breathing stopped as a feeling of absolute horror came over me. Whatever it was coming toward me, it couldn’t have come at
28
~ C h a p t e r o n e : B l u r o f Fa n ta s y ~
a worse time. I was already on the edge, and now this. But for the bluish light up ahead, there was nothing but blackness and trees and snow surrounding me and a deafening silence broken only by the sound of my own heart pounding up through my neck. “Oh God,” I thought, as the animal came closer, and for an instant, the gap between my world of light and the darkness of my attic was breached and I was inside its darkness, with its rafters, and nails not quite pounded in… alone and helpless without even my covers to pull over my head. The animal was nearly upon me when suddenly the backlight of the bluish hue gave way and I could see clearly…that it was Poncho! “Jesus Christ!” I yelled, falling to my knees in the snow. Once again, Poncho had found me, no doubt travelling the road at first, getting out ahead before spotting me in the forest behind him. I was shaken, but knew now that I would be all right. So we continued on together, passing the house with the blue-green light, and moving forward through the snow. It wasn’t much farther before I could see the outskirts of town. I moved back onto the road, which dropped sharply in a curved arc leading into town, and I could see the gas station on the corner ahead. The phone booth was there. I was slipping on the ice as I made my way down the steeply sloping road into town, and the cold was now coming through my rubber boots freely, biting at my feet. Soon I was closing myself into the phone booth. The rest of the town was dark. Shaking from the cold, I should have called the police, but instead, I called my grandmother in the valley below, who told me to stay put while they drove up to get me. So, sliding beneath one of the cars parked outside the gas station, I waited. I don’t remember how we got back up our steep driveway that night, whether we drove or walked it. It seems like we must have walked it, but one of my mother’s friends often came over with his miniature snowplow to clear the driveway for us every now and then, so maybe we drove. Anyway, by the time we got home, Mom had
29
~ Focusing Emptiness ~
cleaned herself up as best as she could. My grandparents had phoned the house prior to our arrival so she knew they were coming and tried to make it look like it was only a small fight. It turned out later that the crash I had heard was Mom throwing our television set at my stepfather after he had knocked one of her teeth loose and had given her a black eye. Mom tried to laugh the whole thing off but it wasn’t easy through her black eye and swollen lip. It took a few more months of this sort of thing before Mom finally kicked my stepfather out for good. But finally, finally… he was gone, and there was a block of time when things were calm, though Mom was struggling to make ends meet. My stepfather boasted for many years that he “never gave her a dime of child support,” despite the court order. How he could have boasted about that to me was a mystery. It was my sisters, my brother, and I who were the ones hurt. But at least now there was peace and quiet, and my sisters could put their effort into trying to fit into the local social scene on the mountain instead of trying not to trip over a drunk passed out in the middle of the living room floor.
30
