The most sacred thing we have to share is our story.

Travels around the outer edges of our culture.

Hawk Blue and White

Young, I was never made for the common world —
my nature was to love the hills and mountains.
By mistake I fell into the dusty net
and was gone, all at once, thirty years.
The caged bird longs for its old forest;
the pond fish remembers deep water.
Now I’ve cleared land at the edge of the southern wild,
keeping things simple, come home to garden and field.
Too long shut inside a cage —
now I return to what I am.
- Tao Yuanming (365–427, Taoist recluse-poet) — from “Returning to the Farm to Dwell”

When I get together with friends around a campfire or to share a meal, and an interesting subject comes up, I don’t launch into a Taoist/Zen interpretation of the topic. I tell a story. Over the years, mostly because I find other people’s words more interesting than I do my own, I’ve rarely told stories in Zen Mountain Journal or its predecessor, Heron Dance. A week ago a literary agent approached me expressing an interest in publishing my memoir. This has happened five or six times over the last thirty years. I’ve always declined, including last week, because I don’t like looking backwards. But since that conversation last week I’ve been thinking about the number of times friends have told me that they find my stories to be unusual and interesting. It is important I think, that we who do this kind of work listen to what others tell us about where the work is adding something unique and worthwhile to others, regardless of our own inclinations. Sometimes those inclinations – like for instance other people’s lives are more interesting than my own – may not be valid.

I left home for the first time when I was fifteen. I hitchhiked across the country looking for a group of Indians led by Chief Smallboy who had left the Hobbema Reserve south of Edmonton to live traditionally on Crown Land in Alberta, Canada. (Crown Land in Canada is roughly the same as BLM land in the US). I had become fascinated by the lives of indigenous peoples from wilderness canoe trips with the YMCA in northern Quebec. We came across old abandoned log cabins, some that had been occupied by white trappers in the 1930s, and some that were Indian cabins. There were usually several Indian cabins in a row huddled together in sheltered coves and we’d go into them and get a glimpse of their traditional lives. The cabins fascinated me. When I returned home I read every book on the traditional ways of native peoples in the high school and city libraries. I also, through a serendipitous chain of events, had gotten to know a family of Mi’kmaq Indians who made jackets out of smoked moosehide. I spent many evenings and weekends with them learning how they did it and about their lives and philosophy.

So I set off at the age of 15 from Ottawa in search of Chief Smallboy, about 2300 miles away. I came close. A couple of Indians in a pickup truck stopped outside of small town that was, as close as I could figure, about 20 miles from Smallboy’s camp. I explained who I was looking for. They told me to jump in the back. About twenty miles later at a crossroads way back in the woods, they stopped the truck, told me that Smallboy’s camp was somewhere around here, and it was time for me to get out. I grabbed my pack, got out and started walking. I didn’t know what else to do. No more vehicles passed by that evening. I walked for a few miles and camped. The next morning another pickup with Indians stopped. They had never heard of Smallboy they said. I knew enough about Indians to know that what they were really saying is that they didn’t want a teenager with long red hair living with them. I was who they were trying to get away from. They drove me back to the small town where I had started from the previous day. Having no where else to go and since it was still early summer I decided to hitchhike to Vancouver – the Haight-Ashbury of Canada. Along the way a beautiful eighteen year old woman picked me up. She lived in Field BC in a beautiful pass – Kicking Horse Pass in Yoho National Park right on the Alberta border. I spent the summer with her and her American deserter and draft dodger friends – this was during the Vietnam War. We had a fun time.

The next summer my dream became a reality through a circuitous chain of events and I did end up living with Indians in the bush. I hitchhiked up to Great Slave Lake in Canada’s subarctic. There were hundreds of fires burning in the scrub and stunted boreal forest surrounding Yellowknife. The Forest Service was desperate for firefighters. I was broke. I told them I was eighteen. No one checked my ID. Being 18 was the sole qualification needed to get the job. The Northwest Lands & Forest Service flew me out to a fire in a helicopter. The crews were all Dogrib (Dene). Most couldn’t speak English. They were familiar with Edmonton – that’s where the prison and hospital was – but they had almost no concept of Canada and had never heard of the then prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. I learned a lot about their lives. A few weeks later the nearby tower lookout quit. I was the only person nearby English-speaking and available. They sent the helicopter back to get me. I spent the rest of the summer living alone in a tent on top of a big rock and reporting on fires from an old tower that would sway back and forth in the constantly howling wind.

I’ve spent most of my adult life on some edge or other. I haven’t worked on an hourly or salaried basis since I was seventeen. It has always been my own endeavors, some of them creative some of them business. In that time I’ve met and interviewed about a hundred and fifty fellow travelers on the periphery of the culture – Outward Bound Instructors who went on radical adventures in their time off, people who volunteered in refugee camps, in prison, in homeless shelters. People who climbed the world’s highest mountains, who sailed alone around the world, who sailed with Thor Heyerdahl, who worked to protect wilderness. And I volunteered in a medium security prison with the Quaker Alternatives to Violence program in order to interview inmates serving long sentences and who were working with young inmates to help them find a better path.

When I published those interviews back in the earlier days of Heron Dance I didn’t offer much in the way of commentary or reflection. The earliest of these interviews and road trips occurred thirty five years ago so I’ve now had time to reflect on them and on the friendships I’ve built with those I’ve gotten to know. Now I’m ready to share what I’ve learned, including the hard lessons of failure and sacrifice that living in your own way on your own terms doing your own thing entails. On the whole it has been a big, exciting, full and interesting way to live life.

Thinking over this idea – making storytelling a big part of Zen Mountain Journal going forward -- I approached a long time reader and supporter of this work whose opinion I deeply respect. He said to me, “The most sacred thing we have to share is our story. The most sacred thing we can receive is another person’s story.” (Jim Newsom, backwoods forest dweller and possible future interview subject.)

And I’ve begun approaching people for new interviews. Some are people I interviewed years or decades ago. Some, like Red Pine/Bill Porter, would be new interviews.

For more thoughts on stories from the outer periphery of our culture, and the questions they leave behind, see the new home page on the Zen Mountain Journal website here.

To view his post on the Zen Mountain Journal website, visit here.