Wonderlust

Four Days With The Klepingers

Generational Wisdom

For the next three nights and four days we stayed with my Uncle Jon's family in Woodenville, WA. Lucky for us we had the rare opportunity to visit while the girls were home during their summer break. Which was really nice for me as I hadn't seen my cousins Aurelia and Hanna since our Granddad's funeral in 2007. We had a nice walk around the neighborhood our first night and a delicious dinner made by my Aunt Jean. We were able to take showers and wash our dirty clothes, and by then it was time to hit the hey. The next day I helped Uncle Jon with a landscaping project which consisted mainly of taking trips to the dirt store filling the trailer then unloading it onto the driveway and spreading it about an inch thick about twenty square feet in-between the garden and front driveway, then returning to the dirt store for a reload.

During the short while it took to make trips to the dirt store and back Uncle Jon and I spent our time engaged in lively conversation; given that he and I could find no subject of great enough interest to debate over, we turned our conversation instead to a more constructive avenue: life in the broader sense. I was drilled on all the generic points; what I wanted to do with my life, where I saw myself in ten years, and so forth; but it was when I mentioned that I was feeling distraught over the general corruption of our American education institutions overall – that I wanted to pursue a PHD in philosophy and political theory and, or in addition to, religious studies (from an academic perspective), but was unsure on the prospect of selling my soul to the devil or worse, a credit lender, in order to achieve such a goal – that I awoke in my uncle a kind of sympathy I cannot recall ever receiving from any relative yet in my life.

He told me, “Jon, you and I are not that much different, when I was your age, though I was better looking, I struggled over many of the same issues. I hated The Man same as you, and probably trusted him less.” He told me his experience of coming to this realization one night on top of secluded hill in the middle of a small woods. It is a moment which he has come to judge his life against, it was a kind of marker for him, that everything that came before was one part of his life and everything that has come after has been that of another. The pretext to his story was that his now wife, my Aunt Jean, had just broken up with him and gotten back together with her previous boyfriend, my uncle was confused, and probably distraught with heartbreak and in his desperate state he decided to join some peers for who were going out for a night in the woods. They had a bonfire, alcohol, drugs, guitars, all the ingredients needed for a wild night. My uncle took some psychedelic mushrooms at some point that night and what followed changed his perspective, his angle on life if you will, forever. His description of crossing a stream, falling in, which startled him (more by the fact that he was trying to be silent and anonymous to his “loser” peers who partied nearby – which I can relate to completely; a drug journey, if the right intentions are applied, is an altogether private matter to the person who is on it – than the fact that he had been spooked by the sudden presence of water), ran as quickly as he could into the wild night, retreating to a kind of small hilltop somewhere nearby where, he described to me, he was transported through a wormhole or vortex into another dimension. He told me that this experience revealed to him the nature of the universe, and, although he admitted with some amount of uncertainty that it was all in his own mind, he had what any religion would classify as a spiritual encounter, a visitation from the divine.

It was at this time my uncle came the realization that the world wasn't ever going to change and that he could exhaust himself fighting against it for the rest of his life or he could choose to accept it and work from within the system to change it. “You will never find peace or satisfaction if you choose to fight them all.” he said, “But you can choose to fight small battles from within if you can find acceptance; work form inside and you can achieve greater influence.” I do not disagree with his advise, that is to say that I do not agree entirely, but I do thank him for it. It is very good advise indeed, and something which has gotten me back on the path of considering the risks of pursuing a higher education. I am resolved in doing what it takes to go the distance, I know I have what it takes, and it is something I want to accomplish, just not for the reasons my uncle views as a means to an end.

My own psychedelic experiences have been eerily similar ones and before now I have looked to writers like Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leery, Herman Hesse, and Richard Albert for understanding and for solace. I can recall one evening two summers behind me, my friend (and at the time my spiritual compeer) Alex and I were roaming around the grounds surrounding the Butte College Main Campus, which is surrounded on three sides by medium sized buttes (small grassy hills about a hundred feet to their summits). It was a full moon that night and many small purple wild flowers were still in bloom left over from a late spring. Alex and I had each eaten two grams of mushrooms and smoked a bowl of weed in the main campus quad. We meditated for a while until a certain point when without any words being exchanged between us we each stood up abruptly and in a sort of warrior manner briskly headed through the campus to its border, marked by an unnatural asphalt
road which winds around the whole of the campus, then leaping in one quick and totally silent movement over the steel bar gate which pretends to close nature off to those who are not permitted entrance, we ran howling like animals through the moon lit fields. I can remember leaping over rocks that I wasn't even looking out for and which I never saw but seemed to instead feel the presence of, I thought that this must be how animals are able to run through unknown, un-manicured, and totally wild terrain with quickness and ease. I felt a oneness with nature, with the universe, time melted away, or never existed at all. I was totally unafraid; if I had been asked then what fear was I would have probably been unable to comprehend the meaning of the question.

More recently I had an encounter with LSD, this was an altogether different beast. Again I was with Alex and again we commenced on our journey in much the same manner. This time there were three of us, it was another hot Chico summer night, we chose my parents backyard as our setting. Sitting on the ground each facing the other two talked about what our intentions for the evening were. When we had each taken time to thoughtfully orate to the others our expectations we took our vessels in hand, two tabs of acid entered into our bodies orally. We smoked a few bowls of weed (this is customary in any social engagement in Chico) and went into private meditation. One by one each of us left the circle and journeyed into the yard.

I remember coming upon my mother's chayote plant, a vegetable which looks and tastes similar to cucumber but is shaped more like a pear, it has large purple flowers which were slightly closed up. I was interested because I knew the plant only during the day when the flowers are completely open and large, I didn't know that they ever closed up. I was pulled to this plant, it seemed to want to tell me something. I sat in spiritual communion with that plant for what was probably in the neighborhood of an hour, watched it breath, move, it was like watching a beautiful naked woman asleep in my bed. I remember being able to see the Chayote's pulse in its stock the same way you could watch the pulse of blood in the sleeping beauty's neck as she slept. And then the chayote began to awaken, as the sun began to rise, and her flowers began, ever so slowly and gracefully, to open, as though she were stretching as she awoke from a deep sleep. I can remember seeing clearly the small hairs on the inside of her pedals and stigma move around like tiny nearly microscopic feelers. I thought, “if this were the way we always saw nature, if this were normal, if this was how we related to the world, then pollution could never happen, we wouldn't destroy the planet for the sake of industry and profit, we would no longer strive for a more comfortable home to live in, we wouldn't bother ourselves with trifles like war, or religion, we would be happier.” I began welling up as tears streamed steadily down my cheeks, dripping from my chin to Chayote's soil bed. I gritted my teeth and uttered the words “Fuck you!” as harshly and angrily as I could while not disturbing my fellow trip-ees who were each on their own vision quests, discerning their own relationships with their universe. I still don't know whom I meant to receive that curse, whether it was directed at the chayote plant or perhaps to nature herself. I think that I was feeling angered that this truth had been shadowed from me, that though I have always felt an affinity to nature in all its wonder and beauty, I had never seen nature as vibrant and alive as I did that night. Perhaps, if there is a god, my curse was directed at the heavens.

The most remarkable insight for me on the receiving end of my uncle's confession telling, a man whom I have known my whole life as a figure of severe parental authority, one which like his father, my Granddad, should never be crossed, was not the admission that he had once been a young man like me and had done his fare share of experimentation as well as anyone of his peers or anyone of mine for that matter, nor was it the idea that he thought of me as an equal, worthy of allowance into such communion (this is something that may have surprise me a few years ago, but I have since gotten used to, as so many adult figures whom I have known since I was a small child have opened up in ways that if they had done when I was 14 would have scarred me, or shaken me to a point of severe inverted-ness), it was the realization that I share many similarities with my uncle beyond a common genetic structure; our very outlooks on life, though we have come upon them within the context of different generations and altogether different world structures and values, the worldviews each of us have concluded upon have been remarkably similar thus far if our lives where to be layered on top of one another. Albeit I still have much to experience and learn in this life, I can at least find some solace knowing that I am not totally insane in my inherent rebelliousness.

I may be radical in my thinking and in my actions, but after having been shared this treasure by my uncle, I have found great comfort in learning that exhaust-less questioning of every stitch of this thing we call existence, from the concept of god to the institutions of man is a common trait among members in my family and is probably as much attributed to genetics as it is to my family's long history of rebelliousness; after all, I am by my birthright a Friend (or Quaker as the rest of the world knows us). I was not raised a Quaker, in the sense that my family did not attend Meetings, but I was raised with the same traditional values.

A Private View Of The Seattle Skyline

On our last day Hanna took us on a small tour of the city walking around the downtown area and the Seattle Public Market, more of an outdoor fish market/outdoor clothing boutique mall. We walked through crowded walkways full of small venders and lots of tourists, stopping every now and again when we saw something that peeked our interests, though Hanna forget often that we were all three tourists ourselves and wanted to look at many things that she found to be of little interest or “too touristy” walking away sometimes in utter annoyances, trying her hardest to distance herself from us as far as she could get away with without loosing us entirely to the swarm of the crowd. We walked past the first Starbucks store established in 1971, though because of a line going out the door and a few paces down the sidewalk we decided it better that we not try to get inside, which I am just as glad we didn't.

After a couple of hours of the Public Market we walked back to the car and drove the few blocks to Uncle Jon's lab to pay a visit and get a grand tour. He showed us around the lab demonstrating how each various machine in the lab worked and answered many questions. I didn't fully understand all the reasons for it but I did learn about the process of isolating major proteins, testing them, then sending them off to larger labs which will duplicate the processes in larger batches. Seemed very interesting but not something that could be fully grasped in fifteen minutes. Getting back on the freeway heading back to the house shouldn't have been a difficult task but almost as soon as we got on we were faced with a dilemma of a left onto the 505 or a right onto the 505, Hanna had no idea the difference and since I was already in the left lane and traffic was heavy I decided not to chance a sudden lane change. Of course it was the right lane that we had wanted and Roberta, as Hanna named our GPS, lead us around the back way which much to the relief of an already hyper enlivened Hanna added only ten minutes to our trip. When we got back Hanna showered and got ready for work running out the door almost as soon as she had come running in. An hour later Eri and I drove Auri to class and went grocery shopping at the local Trader Joe’s. When we got back dinner was waiting, grilled vegetables from the garden and smoked salmon; it was a real treat.

The Long And Winding Road

Washington To The Montana Border

The morning of July 9th marked the beginning of our journey east across the US. Packed into our small car with our luggage, food, and road provisions, we had little extra room for our own bodies. We took in the sights of beautiful Washington from the I-90; most of which w,as seen through heavy to light rain, but as my Aunt Jean had pointed out, “in Washington there is a saying that goes, if you don't like the weather, wait an hour”, truly, as once we got over the Cascade Range the weather went from green forests dripping with water under gray skies to dry golden brown and yellow mountainous deserts under a clear blue sky, which seemed to happen in an instant, the way a cartoon character might have walked from day on one half of the screen to night on the other, I swear that if I had blinked I would have thought I had drove through a worm hole, actually the more I think of it, I did blink.

When we finally reached the border and crossed into Idaho Eri and I were both feeling it was time for a pit stop. We pulled off the freeway and were immediately in the middle of vast farmland as far as we could see. I took a much needed road side leak and just as I was finishing up a red truck pulled up pulling a water tank. I was happy when the driver didn't scold me for pissing near his crops, even happier still when he offered that we dig up some of his potatoes. He was a very nice man and was very curious about California when he learned that was where we were from. When he learned that Eri was Japanese I think he nearly jumped out of his car with interest. He asked about the earthquake and how her family was, and if she was alright, of course he seemed pleased to learn that these strange travelers near his farm were happy and full of hope. He wished us the best of luck on our travels and bid us farewell. Eri thought, and I have to agree with her, that he looked a lot like the food he grew. We dug up about eight potatoes then got back on the freeway.

Around 6:30pm we crossed our next border into Montana and two hours later were in Missoula where we planned to camp for the night. Arriving at the campsite we became less confident it was actually a campsite, but Roberta assured us that we had in-fact arrived so we unpacked and looked for a place to set up. Walking around we became less and less convinced of the area being a campground and more and more convinced we had found a small municipal park complete with picnic tables, tended lawns, and sprinkler heads, which we were inclined to sleep as far away from as possible; after some searching around we found a small area near a creak beneath several dwarf pines to set our tents for the night, though I was very sure it was not intended as a campsite but it was away from the sprinkler's range so it was enough.

Enter Montana

The next day was for the most part filled with uneventful driving rounded out by various spectacular sights along the road, including a sudden and quite unexpected storm complete with hail and a dazzling lightning show which we were rewarded with front row seats to. Later that day we pulled over having seen a huge cavern in front of us that looked like it needed exploring. It took some small but steep rock climbing and then a short hike to get to but it was well worth it, even despite swarms of mosquitoes. It didn’t look natural and I figured that it must have been an abandoned mining operation as it appeared to have been dynamited out. With a ceiling of about two hundred feet from the lowest point and a depth of at least as much, there was plenty of evidence that it was a popular place for drinking and shooting guns, probably for local teens, as there were plenty of abandoned beer bottles, cans and bullet casings as well as graffiti and one rather artfully painted platoon memorial plastered on a large boulder in the middle of the cavern.

That night we camped in a small private campground that was surrounded on three sides by cattle farms. We met three fellow Californians, Laura, who was an elementary school teacher, her boyfriend Ernesto who was from Mexico originally but was studying here in the U.S., and Cory, who was also a student. We invited them to camp with us at our site as there were no others available and they were grateful to the offer, and as the campground charged per site and not per tent, it worked like a dream reducing our rent from $4 each to $2 a head.

We learned that they were returning from a friends wedding ceremony in Seattle Washington and were now on their way to Yellowstone for two days before heading back to California. We were happy to have the company and had a wonderful evening around the fire with them, learning, among other things, that not only were they from California but all three lived in Palo Alto, quite near where Eri and I had lived for the past year in Mountain View; we felt like it would have been appropriate to hum a verse of “It's A Small World After All” but were able to keep our restraint.

Eri impressed our new friends with her gourmet dinner cooked over a roaring camp fire, while Ernesto and I tried our luck collecting more fire wood along the small brook behind our camp. Over dinner we shared our plans for the rest of our trip; Cory suggested we join them on their hike in Yellowstone, which we thought to be a brilliant idea though in the end agreed to stick to our individual paths and if they should meat again we would be all the more joyous and welcoming for their collision. I enjoyed the last of my Sierra Nevada beer supply, having exhausted most of it with Uncle Jon, and by the time it was finished it was near 9pm and we were exhausted,.Grateful to be able to climb into warm sleeping bags, we all three slept soundly and comfortably in the warm summer air under a nearly full moon, taking in lung fulls of sweet wheat and cattle ranch air.

Already the summer of 2011 has turned out to be quite the memorable one. After moving out of our apartment on the 24th of June my girlfriend Eri and I, all of our belongings packed into the back of a Ford truck my Father rented for the day, drove to my parents house in Sacramento California to unload it all for storage in the upstairs bedroom. The next day Eri and I, my younger sister and my mother loaded into my small car and drove the remaining distance to my hometown of Chico. This hour and a half drive made a good prelude to what was just on the horizon, as our plan was to drive, with my little sister in the back seat of my parents Prius, north as far as Seattle Washington then east to Wisconsin, where we planned to visit with family for eleven days before flying from Chicago O'Hare to Narita Japan on the 28th of July. Quite ambitious but nothing the two of us are not confident in undertaking.

The first six days of our tramping was spent in Chico assisting with Dad's plans to build a deck over the hole in the backyard which used to be a pool but hadn't held water in it for nearly fifteen years. This, as it turned out, was not an easily executed task, as it was already averaging 90º F by mid June and one afternoon even broke 100º F. We were graced with two days of thunderstorms which gave Eri and I some time to do some last minute preparations for our trip, but none the less it remained quite hot even during the downpours.

The time we spent in Chico, though brief; filled mostly with deck building, was gratifying. I was grateful to have been able to see Sara off before her big move to Paris France, and the handful of other friends we ran into were all cherished encounters.

On July 5th we began our long drive across the continental United States, totaling more than 2,800 miles. Our first stop was a modest 251 miles to our friend–my old Peet's Coffee co-worker–Reid's father's sixteen acre property in Ukiah California. It was a lovely time, we camped right on the Russian River under the stars laying next to the fire in our sleeping bags and listening to several different musician friends of Reid's taking turns playing tunes they knew on their guitars. The next day we woke up to the morning sun beating on our faces, then made breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. We drove a short distance down the road to a large Buddhist community appropriately named The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. The first thing we noticed nearly the same instant we crossed the thresh hold of the massive Chinese temple styled gate marking the boundary of the city, Prosperity Ave, as I recall the street being apply named, we encountered, in fact nearly ran straight into, a living peacock sitting, statue-like, on the lowest hanging branch of a large Oak. The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas is home to more than a thousand practicing monks and has a boys K-12 school, girls K-12 school, a home for the elderly, and a post office. Reid told us that the area was formally a mental health facility years ago, then sat vacant for several years before being moved into by the monks in the eighties. It was easy to see that this was indeed the case as many of the buildings, including the impressive front gate entrance, looked as though they had been kept exactly as they were, adding only impressive Chinese styled rooftops to enhance their appearances. This made for some very funny looking buildings which remained simple western, flat, and rectangular from the bottom up with huge awkward looking though beautifully artisan-ed rooftops, which seemed to have been lifted directly from an ancient building in China and dropped there to rest.

Leaving Reid's place after such a short visit was a bit bitter sweat, I was happy that we were able to meet up with him but I was sad that it was for just a few hours. Driving all the way through the night and into the early part of the morning we made it to a tiny motel called the Relax Inn in Ashland Oregon. The next morning we woke, took showers and packed up the car, heading into the downtown area around 10:30am. We had a lovely breakfast at a local cafe and walked around for a couple hours before heading to the New Theatre for a bit of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The Show was absolutely breath taking. So well done it was actually haunting, and we all left the theatre, I think it's safe to say, a bit shaken. The director made the right decision in changing the gender of the title role, and because it was a small theatre in the round, the actors where able to bring the audience directly into the production, sometimes getting us riled up from within the audience itself.

Our next stop was Eugene Oregon, though as we learned later, not really. Our friend Jessica and her boyfriend Ido had invited us out to Jessica's parents ranch for the weekend to camp out and enjoy some friends company, spending the daytime hours at the Oregon County Fair, apparently a Renaissance fair on acid. The ranch was actually about twenty miles outside Eugene and our GPS device had a hard time finding it. It didn't help that we made it to our destination till around 10pm and when our friendly GPS personality, we affectionately began calling Roberta, informed us we had arrived we were literally spot in the middle of nowhere. Emerging from the car the only clue we had that we were at least in the right county were voices in the distance and the faint glow of a camp fire; now the only question was, how to to get out there.

Walking back to the road we quickly realized our mistake, the correct driveway was about twenty feet further than Roberta had indicated so back in the car, one last quick drive for the day. A knock on the door, then hugs and a few quick introductions later we were lead to the camp, or more appropriately described as the Viking homestead. And it was, Jessica's brother Azoulas built the camp as a kind of nature return/retreat haven. There was a main homestead lodge like tent that was built with long logs, used as support, and canvas draped across the the top ceiling beam dropping around the sides to the ground. Standing inside of the structure was pretty impressive, and roomy. At least ten feet, maybe even as much as twelve feet to the highest point of the ceiling, a long mess table in the center of the room with enough room to sit fifteen people comfortably, two rooms on either side, my guess if I had to make it would be about 450 square feet in total. Three other sleeping tents of fare sizes circled the encampment around a nice sized fire pit.

The Oregon Country Fair was the reason for the gathering of friends at Jessica's so the next morning we dawned our hippie garb – for some this meant zombie make-up in addition to M.C. Escher pants – then headed out for a day of renaissance fairing on acid (only we were not the ones on the LSD, the fair itself was). Other fair goer's costumes were the best part of this fair, and from what Jessie told us, seems like the only way to fully appreciate the fair is to be one of the lucky majority who get invited to camp out and party when the regular fair goers go home for the evening. There were some really fun shows, like the small circus group, who reminded me of a traveling gypsy group from the turn of the century, and the man who demonstrated how to start a fire with nothing more than two sticks. The drum circle was really where the party was at and I noticed some of the same drummers the whole day through, really impressive if you consider the fact that it was about 95 °F throughout most of the day. Our Friend Ryan joined another guy at the gate who was giving out free hugs and pretty much stayed there through the rest of the day, but almost everyone else in the group got separated at some point and trying to find everyone was a task that we were not able to accomplish until we made it back to the ranch, where we were delighted to discover that our group had nearly doubled. Azoul had met some friends and invited them back to the camp to join us for the evening. Lucky for us two of the girls were musicians and they charmed us around the fire with various original songs they had composed themselves. It was sad the next morning saying all our goodbyes, we had to get back on the road in order to keep on schedule to Uncle Jon's in Washington while the rest of the group prepared for another day at the fair.