Coming out of the Scary Closet. Part 6 A very Magical journey. Section A Jill and PackRat.

Coming out of the Scary Closet. Part 6   A very Magical journey. Section A Jill and PackRat.


Imagine you are a King, in a Land Ruled by Fear.
You build a tall castle to protect yourself.
But the wall is solid and there are no windows.
The roof tops are pointed so no one can climb on them
And the King hides in this castle
All the time wondering ,”what lies beyond” the walls.

This was our life for some time…
Janine’s and my path were moving apart.
She “wanted some space” so we got her an apartment and I hit the road.
Our VW bus was upgraded to an old motothome…27 feet,
 I had power wherever I went so could do my artwork, which we were selling for money now.
 So I could be anywhere and create stuff….
 I took off for a place that had always been very magical for me; Plaskett Creek.

So the King of the Land ruled by fear was set free to Fly.
I got to the camp that night… but was still living in the Land of Fear .
I turned on my burglar alarm and locked the door and proceeded to go to bed.
Something told me that there was only one way I was going to survive in the near future…
and that was if I gave up my Fear..
I contemplated this for a moment. And thought of how I wasn’t afraid of dying..
And the probability of something “good” happening was just as probable as something “bad” happening. … And I knew that I had to just drop my Fear…
And I did, and I turned off my alarm, unlocked my door and opened it, with just the screen door keeping out the bugs…and I went to sleep.
In the morning I got up and looked outside under my canopy there were some back packs piled up…HMMM.???
I went out and looked around but didn’t see anyone.
Well there is a little crag there…a rocky hill covered in poison oak crisscrossed with deer trails that led up to a point that overlooked the whole shoreline for many miles, and also overlooked the whole camp below.  Whenever I come here I run up the deer trails and meditate on the little peak there.  So I decided to repeat this ritual and suddenly was re-united with an old friend I used to do this with. His name was Friend, he was a German Shepherd…He was the alpha male of a small pack of dogs. Years before we saved him (I’m sure)..he came into our camp half dead, sooo skinny and literally covered in ticks that looked like he was wearing a pinto bean suit… That’d be funny if it weren’t so gross.
Anyway we nursed him back to health, took off all the ticks…. Then whenever we came to that camp in many future times, he always found us…sometimes he was solitary, other times had a pack.  Today he had a pack and it was exhilarating running up these very steep deer trails with him and his pack…all the while avoiding the poison oak.  AHHHHHH.  We got to the top and Friend sat beside me like he always used to and I got ready to meditate.  But looking down I saw 3 guys walking on top of the bluffs that overlooked the beach.  Two of the guys were heading back in the camp direction, another one went to the cliffs. I saw him going to this spot where there was a little plaque where some dog had fallen to it’s death.  It was a really high straight up and down cliff with jagged rocks below.   Then I saw the guy JUMP OFF THE CLIFF.  Holy Yikes!!!! So I take off flying down the rocks, a little out of balance…. Stir up a nest of bees, get attacked, then bit…all on the run. Stop and grab some mud from the road and smear it on my bites and take off running towards the beach. I see two guys crossing over into the camp, I run across the highway, and see the third guy…PHEW, how did he do that, I saw him jumping off the cliff…and there was nothing that could have stopped his fall except jagged rocks maybe 40 feet below… I turned back and walked towards camp.
Well about 7 years prior to this I first found myself at Plaskett Creek. It was before Janine and I  got married, actually right after she gave me back my ring when I was running on the walls and ceiling. I was on vacation from my job at the phone company, and hitchhiked down the coast. Anyway that time 7 years before this I met a girl at that camp, she was from Canada. ( She wanted me to go to Mexico with her and her Dog Bush.) She was sitting next to her VW bus playing a flute. Well now 7 years later I’m walking through the same camp I had met that girl in, and sitting there on the ground was a girl playing her flute, same exact spot as the girl seven years before.

She had black hair and a long flowing skirt and a mans shirt on. She smiled up at me and had twinkling eyes. She talked just like that girl seven years ago and kept talking about living in the Bush (which was the previous girls dogs name)….Wayyy to trippy.   She got up quietly and walked with me back to my camp. She was from Canada, her name was Jill Marion. She felt very comfortable to me, like some old friend….AND when I looked at her I saw this woman’s face superimposed upon hers… Freaky, better check it out.  We got back to my motorhome and the three guys were there. They had a big old 45 pistol and were shootin it in the bushes.  One of the dudes seems to know me, then he tells me who he his.  That was you Bob Baker during some short and radical biker redneck period or something. I couldn’t believe it was you. (previously a mild mannered hippie travelling jeweler who we toured shows with). Now he was with two guys shooting off a huge gun in my camp.  Well we said our how do you do’s and such and Bob had to leave.  The other guys asked if they could leave their packs in my camp and I said sure then they headed off to the beach. Jill and I talked.  We talked the same language…. I never knew anyone who knew what I was talking about when I talked about what really mattered to me…she knew…  She asked if I was hungry, then went into my motorhome and made something incredible…some bread with sunflower seeds in it that she baked, and all kinds of good stuff. Well after a while the two guys who left their packs came back and asked if they could sleep under the canopy that night…sure. Then three Indian guys came into the camp…We had a fire going, and Jill had a big stew. Some “normal” guy even came and sat by the fire, brought his leftovers and threw them in the pot. Everybody ate.
Now there was a guy there.. the one who jumped off the cliff. He was no ordinary dude. His eyes shined like tiny suns were in them…. I knew there was something special about him, and I felt like we were communicating on some alternate higher frequency of consciousness or something. Anyway he went by ,”Packrat”.  The “normal guy” asked him how’d he got that nickname. Pack rat said, Somebody tell me something that you really want right now. One of the Indians said they’d like a big juicy steak. Packrat twirls around and pulls a raw huge steak out of his long coat…. Some other guy pipes up that he wants some specific camera and goes into all the details about it (all Greek to me), but Packrat twirls around and pulls this camera out of his coat.  Were all a might dazed to say the least. “Anybody else” Packrat says.  Somebody said that they wanted a “lid”.  Which is what an ounce of marijuana was called in those days.  Packrat walks back into the bushes behind our camp…He’s gone for quite some time… I begin to wonder if he left, then he wanders back into the Light of the campfire.  Somebody asked if he had to go far to find it, and he said, no…he had it all along, just needed to go into the bushes to take a pee..
Well I guess maybe it started to rain.  So I invited everyone inside my motorhome and put Hendrix on the 8 track blasting.
Now this whole time Jill was quietly sitting carving a chunk of Serpentine that can be found there. ( I still have the carving…an eagle flying over mountains)…

. I went over and asked if all these crazy and some outwardly scary guys made her nervous, and she said that no, she knew how to make herself invisible….and she literally could.  It wasn’t that if you looked in her direction there would be nothing there…she’d be there, but her image didn’t illicit a mental or emotional response…it was really cool to observe.  Well I was sittin in the back of the motorhome across the table from Jill. There was probably ten of us in there, the music was blasting and you couldn’t hear the person next to you talking…. However sitting in the very far front of the motothome, as far away from me as he could be…. Was Packrat. In between us eight or nine people trying to talk over Jimi playing voodoo child. And there sat PackRat, lookin right at me and it was like even way over there and unable to hear anything in between us, he whispered to me…and I heard all his words crystal clearly, like they were spoken in my head. He had been he said studying with Don Juan in Mexico….
WHAT ???? I never heard of anyone called Pack Rat in Carlos’s books….. But the stuff he was saying, and the things I saw him do made me believe….
Well Jill slept in the motorhome with me in the other bed, everyone else was outside under the canopy….
The next day came and I wanted to be alone with Jill…and she with me, there was a tension to get on with whatever was going on between us. So we took off and headed down the coast. ( I still have some cassette  tapes we made during our travels….secretly taped conversations that we both caught each other on….some radical 12 string jamming with the birds…etc). So we headed down the coast.  I was doing some beading and jewelry projects.  She was drawing a picture that she didn’t want me to see until it was done.  Finally it was done and she showed it to me.

   Yikes and double Yikes. It was the face I saw superimposed upon hers…the face of that Blue Angel I met when I was 8 years old.  I asked her what was this and she told me that when she looked at me…she saw this face. I still have the picture she drew that day over 30 years ago.
So WOW!!!
We were both voraciously talking to each other about things we’d never been able to tell anyone. We traveled together for a few days on the coast, then inland, then back to the coast…and then to a very magical place…and on to meet the Woman in the Drawing.. but it’s getting late and I have an early day tomorrow, so I guess I’ll continue in part 6 section B. later.