The Rock Lady of Santa Cruz - On the Road #23

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

Your friends will know you better

in the first minute you meet

than

your acquaintances will in

a thousand years...

"Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah"

by Richard Bach 

Hey y'all

Well, I've just had an experience like the one described above. 

At the moment, I'm in Ketchikan for a few hours before the ferry carries me to Bellingham. 

The ferry is always an experience, especially the three to four day milk run between Juneau and Bellingham. 

And of course, I'm sleeping on a lawn chair in the solarium with a toaster oven heater hanging six feet above me to stay warm. 

I met Lili Rose due to a reluctance she had to break a promise to her husband. We had several hours in Sitka, and we became hitchhiking buddies on that stop because he didn’t want her hitching by herself, and the town of Sitka is several miles from the ferry.

She was based in Ketchikan for a month. Visiting from Santa Cruz, CA while her cousin was on a diving trip. While he was gone, Lili Rose took a four-day roundtrip on the ferry from Ketchikan to Skagway and back to Ketchikan. We crossed paths as she was going back.

"I have a gift for healing," she said, as we strolled around the church in Sitka.  "I'm known as the Rock Lady because I do so well with stones."

Like many people from California, she was very open in sharing her story, and at first I wrote her off as a New Ager, but she was good company. We got a bottle of wine and two brandy snifters at good will to drink wine in the solarium later. Because of course, she was perched up there too.

I had to admit she even looked the part of a mystic. Petite, with long reddish brown hair, and large crystal green eyes, Lili Rose has a vivid presence.

And then she told me she was only 74 pounds a few months ago, and that she had died and been brought back three times in the last year. 

Having four disks in her neck fused together, complications with her medication affecting her health, she had run the gamut of a modern-day medical nightmare.  She had a food tube forcing nutrients directly to her heart at one point before she figured out that it was the pain killers she was taking for her neck were affecting her system, and got a medical license for marijuana to stop so she could take in enough calories to not starve to death.  She gets high, so she feels okay enough to eat, and if she's not in too much pain, the food stays down.  Since she had stopped taking the painkillers, she had gained forty pounds and was healthy enough to take this trip to see her cousin and twin soul. 

"I choose to be happy," she said.  "It is all a choice, so why choose suffering?" 

A healer in pain all the time, a giver who can't receive, Lili Rose gave me a stone she had carried for almost twenty years.  A clear piece of quartz with copper filaments  threading through it like angel hairs, she described it as "rutile quartz."  She had it with her when she was holding people's hands as they passed from this life, or brought new life into the world.  She swore by it.

"This stone is very powerful," she said.  "It'll send your messages

directly to God."

Since the stone was important to her, the agreement at first was that I could carry it until I came to see her in Santa Cruz, and then we would trade out for a stone with gold filaments.  But by the next morning, she said that it was my birthday gift. 

"My dear, what is the point of giving a gift if one does not also treasure it oneself?"

This classic quote by Colette - the French writer, not our beloved slinger of hash and singer of songs - was the last sentence in a short story by Truman Capote.  I was so impressed by it I recorded it in my journal years ago and thus, have never forgotten it.  So the significance of this gesture by a woman I had known for three hours was not lost on me.

But the best gift from Lili Rose to me was the missing piece in the puzzle of forgiveness.  Without going into the details of the conversation that led to this - anybody who's done any living at all has been stumped on this issue at least once in their lives - we were treating ourselves to a less-than-mediocre dinner served in the swanky ferry dining room when Lili Rose dropped this pearl of wisdom on my plate.

"When you truly forgive, you give up your right to retribution."

Now that's some profound shit, but she went on.

"When you wait for an apology, an acknowledgement, or a punishment to forgive, you are still giving up your energy to a situation, which is what somebody wants who does things that hurt us.  When you give up that right to retribution, no matter how justified, you take back your power."

Wow.

Something tells me this leg of the trip is going to turn into some mystical avenues.

If I ever lose that rock she gave me, shoot me.

Montgomery

Hobo Punks Remembered - On the Road #22

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

In my last On the Road blog here, I mentioned at the end that I had interviewed a few hobo punks who I had met while traveling in Alaska with the potential to freelance an article to the Anchorage Press.

 

It is one of my most painful regrets of that road trip that I didn’t follow through on that. Because I did interview these people. Their stories were incredible, and they deserved to be known for that.

 

I probably had a gnarly case of road fatigue.

For all the excitement and adventure of the unknown and this odyssey, it was exhausting to pack up the Beast and move from town to town, where I didn’t have any roots or emotional investment.

 

I had it in me to interview them. Then that was it.

 

The main people I interviewed, Derrick and Kylie Greene (names changed for privacy) had settled down in Anchorage. At the time that I had met them, they had a young son, and Kiley was pregnant with their second child.

 

This was in the autumn of 2005. In the 90’s, there was an exodus of teenagers out of the homes into the streets. The core of the homeless teens were – and still are - those who left dangerous family environments and those who had gotten kicked out of their homes, usually for coming out as gay.

 

But then there were those who came from safe homes and were simply restless and probably didn’t fit in with the mainsteam conventional culture from which they came.

 

If I remember correctly, Kylie had been a hobo punk longer than Derrick. I think he had hit the road around 16 or 17, whereas she had been on the road from the time she was 13 or 14.

 

Originally from Louisiana, she said her mother and sister worried sick about her, and often begged her to come home, which she would never do no matter how dangerous life on the streets was.

 

“I remember one time me and a couple friends found a squat (an abandoned, empty building) as a place to crash. One night, these older homeless bums came in and saw us. We overheard them talking about how they were going to kill us to claim the space.”

 

Kylie shuddered as she remembered, and shook her head.

 

“We were so scared.”

 

Kylie and Derrick met through the network of hobo punks that hit the road. Both had a lot to say about the network of homeless youth on the road, how they managed with no money and very few resources beyond each other.

 

Safety happens in numbers. Hobo punks know this.

 

They talked about connecting with the Rainbow family, the nomadic tribe that travels from National Park to National Forest year round, when they needed more resources or the security that comes with a group.

 

They talked about hitchhiking and hopping trains, as the hobos of the Great Depression did to get around. They talked about living in squats, sleeping in encampments, panhandling, and receiving money and food from kind-hearted strangers.

 

“It gets harder as you get older,” Derrick said.

 

They also talked about the excessive alcohol and drug use that goes hand-in-glove with that lifestyle.

 

They talked about Punksgiving, celebrated at the same time as conventional Thanksgiving, and that people traveled from all over to come to it. In fact, I’m pretty sure, it was at a Punksgiving that Kylie and Derrick met.

 

Image by Ryan McGuire From Pixabay

They showed me a group photo of an early Punksgiving before they married. Everybody in the picture hammed it up. Kylie had her ginger hair in a Mohawk and wore brown overalls, Derrick had his hair slicked back, and I recognized the guy I found in Seward who told me where to find them.

 

Once they settled down in Anchorage, they’ve been the hosts for Punksgiving. And it was no easy feat for those hobo punks to get to Anchorage from the lower 48 (the rest of the United States, except Hawaii).

 

That was becoming problematic for them.

 

Although it was part of their tribal values to open their homes to their hobo punk family, then they’d have far too many people in their house expecting to be able to stay. They’d drink all day, not help with the bills, housework, look for a job, or anything.

 

And they were in Anchorage in late November, where winter was always well under way.

 

This honest, humble working class family were especially conscious of the difficulty of this. They were torn between the past and the present and the needs for their future, especially because they had a four-year-old son and Kylie was pregnant again.

 

“It’s gotten harder as we’ve gotten older,” Derrick said. “It just doesn’t work to keep partying like that and not doing anything.”

 

“Derrick became a journeyman at his job this year,” Kylie continued. “And things have just changed for us. We don’t know how much longer we can continue to host Punksgiving because it causes a lot of problems.”

 

I asked them if they missed their former way of life. They both nodded.

 

“Yeah,” Kylie said. “But it was just getting too hard. People don’t want to help you out so much when you’re not so young and cute anymore. It’s harder to get rides and money and food and stuff that you just need.”

 

Both of them were only 24-25 years of age at the time of my interview.

 

In the long run, Derrick and Kylie were the fortunate ones.

 

Life on the road is hard, especially the way they lived it. It’s a way of life that the young and restless still engage in. Several years ago, I met a young woman who had lost her leg in an injury where she was hopping a train.

 

Image by lannyboy89 From Pixabay

Derrick and Kylie stopped before life on the road ate them alive.

 

It’s a real shame that I didn’t buckle down and write that article right after I interviewed them. I recorded the conversation but lost that tape – yes, tape as in cassette tape – years ago.

 

If I could recall this much 14 years later, how vivid would that article have been if I had written fresh and inspired?

 

I wonder if Derrick and Kylie still miss the freedom of those rough and ready days as hobo punks.

 

I imagine that they take road trips whenever they can, and I bet they are usually willing to give a hitchhiker a ride.

If you’d like to read the On the Road blog which preceded this one, click here.

Do You Want to Be a Writer? Then Give Yourself Something to Write About!

Hey y’all,

Do you want to be a writer? Then give yourself something to write about.

I made a very nice, proper, young girl very uncomfortable with this piece of advice when she asked me about how I became a writer.

Until I said that, she looked at me with hero worship in her eyes when I told her about my year on the road, selling a book out of an old Four-Runner I called the Beast. Once I told her to get out and do some living if she wanted to find her best stories, she averted her eyes and looked down in the posture of shame.

I’m sad to say that there is no writing class that will give anybody the silver bullet. Mastering the mechanics of the art and craft of writing is valuable, but the real juice of inspiration is sucked from experience.

My best stories come from my life – especially vivid happenings that catapulted me out of my comfort zone, brought me to states of ecstasy and/or agony - anything that made me feel alive. There I found the richest fodder for stories, or even pieces of stories.

For example, there’s a really luscious scene in Challenge that I am especially proud of. Challenge is the third book in Ella Bandita and the Wanderer. The illustration above is the setting for that scene.

As you can see, the illustration is a very sensuous image of a beautiful, naked couple soaking in a shallow pool; the Wanderer is combing Ella Bandita’s hair, while she leans into him and lets her fingers dangle in the water. The backdrop is not only a forest, but the type of old growth woods in the temperate rainforest found in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast Alaska; the pool they are soaking in is a hot spring.

How’s that for a luscious setting?

Have I had a sexy interlude in a sexy hot spring that I’m disguising as fiction? Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t. But my points are I have the experience of living in Oregon. I lived in Alaska for 11 years where I went hiking all the time.

AND I LOVE HOT SPRINGS! I especially love hot springs that are found in the woods of a temperate rainforest, and I have the gorgeous experience of finding my bliss in fabulous places such as these. So…what better setting could there possibly be for a scene that builds sexual tension between these antagonistic characters?

That’s only the beginning. Other examples are the On the Road posts that I put up from time to time. Being on the road with a Beast full of books, telling stories and selling them out of my truck was wwwaaayyy out of my comfort zone. There were so many incredible stories that came out of that.

So, a few weeks ago, I gave my blog an official name, and therefore a theme and purpose, which should help on my author’s platform.

This was a necessary step to moving away from the theme started by my former Operations Manager, Jessica Cox. She did a lovely job of building a blog with writing prompts and writing how-to’s, but that blog did not reflect me, my writing, or my tastes.

Writing advice is well and good, and valuable information that people want and need. I will continue to write blogs offering this, as well as writing prompts. But I will add from my experience and perspective, and hopefully, that will fill in the missing pieces.

Knowing the tricks of the trade to execute good writing pieces is essential, but the experience to inspire those tales is priceless. The mechanics will take care of themselves in due time.

I hope this blog more thoroughly reflects my perspective on the journey of being a writer. Apologies on the month long hiatus. I was rather occupied with the experience of an ayahuasca journey. I’m sure eventually that will find its way into my writing.

So go have an adventure and give yourself something to write about. Happy trails!

Peace,

Montgomery

PS: If you’d like to download Challenge, to read that succulent scene for yourself, you’ll find it here!

Ode to the Brown Beast, King of Resilience - On the Road #1

In 2005, I was extremely blessed to receive a grant from the Rasmussen Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska to self-publish a collection of original fairy tales and hit the road, telling stories and selling a book out of the back of my truck. I was on the road for a year. It was one of the greatest adventures of my life. I kept an email journal that I sent out to my friends, which eventually became a blog due to one of my friends being into it on Juneaumusic.com. I don't know if that site is still up, but if it is, my blog is not there. And self-publishing has changed a lot since then. We rely far more on the internet and more people are doing what I did now. Whereas no other writers were then. Anyway, it seems fitting as adventures in self-publishing continue to resurrect those stories from that time. Enjoy!

Ode to the Brown Beast
King of Resilience
(At least, I hope so)

Cursed be the blockhead that twisted the oil cap too
lightly,

The Brown Beast lost precious blood on the first run
of his long journey.

Clanking its death rattle into Tok, Alaska,
the rider of the Brown Beast was alarmed to
receive the news from a twelve year old with braces
that the Brown Beast would be lucky to make it to
Anchorage...

The Brown Beast would need bypass surgery, if not a
transplant...

"It's got an old heart, and old hearts get tired," 
said the shaman grandfather of the boy.

The boy offered to buy the Brown Beast, if the rider
cared to sell...

No, the rider most certainly did not.
Fear not! 

The Brown Beast rattled and rolled its way out of Tok,

determined to make its way to the City of Muck.

The death rattles wound down to an occasional clank on
slowing to a walk and stop, and the rider was
reassured. Sort of.

The Brown Beast made its way to the city, coming to
life when called upon to do its duty.

But the need for a doctor is imminent, if not
immediate...

Will the Brown Beast ride again, valiantly to the end
of the road, holding out for the Carnival?

Or is it a terminal case?

Either way it sucks that my emergency fund is needed,
oh... immediately.

At least I had a place to crash...

Peace,
Montgomery