Journeys In Search Of Who We Really Are, Tales from one man's search for meaning

PROLOGUE

These are my stories. Something inside of me just needed to tell them to you before I forget them. There was a little boy a long time ago whose father told him stories every night until his mother would shout up the stairs, No more stories, he has to go to sleep now. I'm going to tell you some of my stories now. Before I have to go to sleep. They are tales from my quest to find my true self. Perhaps they will help you in your quest. I hope you enjoy them. I didn’t make them up.

CHAPTER 1 JUDY

Hey there, little bitch. Hey there, little three-legged, chicken-killing bitch. How can you wag your tail and look up at me when I gotta do to you what I gotta do?

I loved being a jackaroo. The three thousand acre station (ranch) was way the hell and gone in the outback, twenty miles west of the tiny town of Trangie, far, far west of the Blue Mountains.

I’d never milked a cow or ridden a horse or driven a tractor or cut the balls off of baby cattle. I loved all of it. Well, maybe not the nut cutting part, but I did that, too. I’d found this job advertised in the Blue Mountain Gazette after being in Australia less than a week. The owner of the station, Allen Kinsey, arranged to meet me in a pub in Sydney and explained over a couple of ice-cold schooners of Toohey’s Lager that I would take my meals with the family, get Sundays off, and be paid the going jackaroo’s wage of two bob an hour, or about twenty-five cents U.S. I felt there must be some power looking out for me.

It was late afternoon and the sun was already sinking into the horizon. My back was covered with flies, and sweat poured out of me all over. A mob of 'roos a hundred yards off zigzagged across the range, sending up a cloud of bull dust that fed into a late day willy-willy, one of those Australian dust devils that often walk across the parched land.

Judy stayed close on my heels, hobbling along on her three legs. She yelped excitedly at a five-foot goana sitting upside down on the trunk of a big gum tree. The huge lizard didn’t bat an eye. I kept stumbling because it was hard to see the ground through tears. I held the rifle awkwardly and tried to keep it from her line of sight.

Kangaroos can breed up to such numbers that they seriously compete for the range on sheep and cattle ranches in Australia. When the 'roo population starts to get out of control, ranchers organize 'roo drives. As many as a hundred shooters will line up and blast away at a mob of kangaroos as they stampede by, being chased by shouting mounted riders and barking 'roo dogs. Judy was a 'roo dog, trained to muster kangaroos and drive them towards the shooters. But she hadn’t chased any 'roos for a long time, not since her left rear leg got crushed by a horse when she cut in too close.

I’d gotten up real early that day to milk the cows, and as usual Judy and the Joey were waiting for me. The baby kangaroo had been thrown out of its mother’s pouch during a 'roo drive, and my boss, Allen, had brought it home for his kids. The Joey and Judy had become good pals. Not great training for a 'roo dog, but since Judy only had three legs and couldn’t chase 'roos anymore, nobody cared. As I milked the cows, I gave each of them squirts in the face. They lapped it up and licked each other’s faces, too. After the milking, I put the milk in the centrifugal cream separator and turned the handle so fast that a spoon would stand up in the cream after it had been in the fridge overnight.

Judy and the Joey were always there at milking time. Judy and I were friends, and I think we loved each other. But she liked to kill chickens. Dianne, Allen’s wife, kept threatening to have Allen shoot her the next time, each time Judy killed another one.

Dianne and Allen were both in their early thirties. Allen’s face, weathered by the harsh sun and blowing dust of the outback, made him look much harder and older than his diminutive wife. Dianne, with her wavy brown hair and little-girl smile, looked almost childlike, but one took Dianne’s angelic visage as indicative of her underlying temperament at one’s peril.

It was lamb-marking season, and Allen and I had been out all day mustering sheep. With our two sheepdogs, Bing and Bong, we were driving a mob of over a thousand animals, and for the next few days we would be very busy cutting off lambs’ balls and slicing coded notches in their ears so other ranchers would know who they belonged to if they strayed into neighboring paddocks.

The sun was already sinking into the horizon as we approached the house. Dianne had been shopping in Trangie and had gotten back a minute or so before we did. Judy always stayed home when we went to the back paddocks. She couldn’t keep up.

We could hear Dianne screaming when we were still a paddock from the last gate. We ran the last quarter mile to the house. There were feathers and dead chickens everywhere. I could just see Judy cowering under the steps, pawing off feathers stuck to the blood on her muzzle and trying to be invisible.

That’s it, Allen, either you do it or I will.

This time, Allen knew he couldn’t get away with not doing it. He got the gun and he was crying. He loved Judy and he was really crying hard. He was a pretty tough guy, and I never thought I’d see him cry over anything. He didn’t take shit from anybody except Dianne when she was really, really pissed. She was really, really pissed.

Allen looked up at me and pleaded, I can’t do it, Yank. I just can’t do it. Will you?

I felt a stabbing pain in a place I didn’t know I had. I sensed the impossibility of his love. I took the gun from his hands and called Judy out from under the steps. She came out immediately and ran after me as fast as she could on three legs, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and her shame. We walked silently to the back of the second paddock and sat down together in the red dust. Just for a few minutes.

Judy put her head in my lap and looked up at me with those soft, loving, eyes, but her tail wasn’t wagging anymore.

Hey, little girl, don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know I’ll always love and you will always be my little girl? You are such a good dog, and it doesn’t matter a shit if you only have three legs.

She rolled onto her back for me to rub her belly. I stroked her softly and she peed herself a bit, like she always did when she was really happy.

I stood up. I could hardly see through my tears as I put the gun to her forehead. She put her head down between her paws. I pulled the trigger. The sound of the rifle blast went into my heart like being stabbed. For a second that lasted an eternity, I couldn’t tell if it was her body or mine that lay twitching in the dust.

Hey there, little bitch. Hey there, little chicken-killin’ bitch. What are you trying to tell me with that small tear of blood between your eyes?

I didn’t go home that night. I slept on the ground in the paddock, next to Judy. The sky was so clear that the stars overwhelmed me and sent me spinning into my depths and obliterated me with their immensity until I disappeared.

CHAPTER 2 THE DREAM

I came into this world by Caesarian section. When her time came, Mom was living in Salisbury, Maryland, where my father was stationed during World War II. I don’t know what went wrong, but I wouldn’t come out. Maybe I didn’t want to. Dad was in the Navy, assigned to a small carrier, The Card, which sank more U-boats than any other U.S. warship. The world was in turmoil, millions of people were dying. Maybe it was the cries of all those killed sailors caught somewhere with me in the Aether, their souls in the nether world the Tibetans call the Bardo, and my as yet unborn soul swirling together, afraid to be dead and afraid to be born. Anyway, I wouldn’t come out, so they had to cut Mom open and take me out.

During most of my childhood, my father was a cancer research scientist at the National Institutes of Health. Dad worked very long hours in the lab at NIH and would come home, eat dinner, and go into his den for hours more to hand calculate the data from his experiments onto handwritten spreadsheets. It was the late 1940’s, and computers for home use hadn’t been invented yet. Dad was working on testing the efficacy of several potentially chemotherapeutic drugs that later became main lines of defense against a variety of cancers. He would test the drugs in vitro (in test tubes in a special apparatus called a Warburg bath) at the lab and then tabulate the results at home. But he would always interrupt his work when it was time for me to go to bed.

My bedroom walls were covered with fold-outs from Life magazine. There were wonderful scenes of jungles with impossible numbers of wild animals all crowded together. I had shelves filled with cigar boxes full of shells, rocks and minerals, coins from foreign lands, and mounted bugs and butterflies. I had so many collections, and Dad helped me gather, identify, and sort each one of them.

On one wall was a big, almost three-dimensional red and blue circus wagon with bars on it. Dad had painted lions and tigers on the back wall of the wagon, and they seemed to be looking out expectantly, perhaps waiting for the nightly storytelling. Dad made his stories up on the spot as he went along. They were stories of Tarbaby, our black cat, and his buddy the robot, Mr. Methuselah. They traveled to the ends of the earth in the omlatrene, a magical vehicle that could go anywhere you could dream. It could travel to other planets or to the depths of the sea or the frozen lands of the poles or into the most remote and wondrous jungles. Tarbaby and Mr. Methuselah had incredible adventures together.

Mom made me go to bed at seven whether it was dark outside or not. In the summer, I could smell the honeysuckle blooming outside my window. The lightning bugs were just beginning their nightly show, and I could hear the beckoning sound of metal lids being slapped shut on empty glass peanut butter jars as kids chased the luminaries down and captured them for later use as pretend lanterns. The only saving grace for having to go to bed before all of my friends was Dad’s stories.

At seven thirty, Mom would inevitably start shouting upstairs, That’s enough, he has to go to sleep. Wrap it up or he’ll never get enough rest.

I’d beg Dad to tell me just a little more. I could usually wheedle an extra fifteen minutes of story before Mom eventually had her way.

I had a wondrous childhood and explored my imagination and my environment endlessly. But at night, sometimes I had this strange, recurrent dream. Maybe it was because I had been untimely ripped from my mother’s womb. I never made the transition that most people make when they pass from wherever we are when we are in the womb, down the birth canal with all of the associated trauma, and into the world of symbols and reality grids. Oh, I came into the same world as we all do, of course, but maybe not being born in the usual way left something attached to some Other-Where without symbols or grids. I don’t know.

From the age of three or four, this strange, recurrent dream would visit me, and it wasn’t pleasant. It started with a vibration and a deep tone that was not really sound. The vibration became more and more intense, the soundless tone louder and louder, but steady and unchanging in frequency. Then the vibration slowly changed and became increasingly uneven, the tone more and more discordant, building to an arrhythmic crescendo that filled me with a sense of -- I don’t know how to describe it other than chaos. It terrified me.

I would get out of bed filled with dread and not know where I was or who I was, or even what I was. I would run around and whimper and cry and try to hide in the closet at the top of the stairs that led to the ground floor, where my parents slept. When I think of the dream even now, I can smell the mothballs in that closet put there to protect Dad’s old Navy uniforms.

My mother would come to me, but I wouldn’t know her. She frightened me and Dad frightened me and the vibration and the sound that wasn’t a sound would continue in my head sometimes for half an hour or more. I was somewhere that wasn’t asleep and wasn’t awake, somewhere that felt like being lost in infinity with nothing to grab onto or fit into any perspective. I always came out of it eventually, and my mother would hold me and tell me everything was all right now. Then I’d go back to bed and be okay for the rest of the night.

The dream continued sporadically until I was into my middle teens, although as I got older I was less and less afraid of it and could watch it with a hidden part of my mind and listen to the tone and try to figure it all out. But I never did figure it out. Maybe I was just a nutcase. My parents never took me to a doctor to try to determine what was wrong with me. Maybe they were embarrassed or afraid I would be locked up. I don’t know, but the dream finally just went away and didn’t come back.

Sometimes I wish I could have the dream again, just to see if I would relate to it any differently now. Maybe I am still a nutcase. Maybe I need to be born all over again the right way, though I’m not really a born-again type. But who am I really? Jad-bal-ja’s Tales are some of the stories about how I tried to find out.

CHAPTER 3 SCIENCE STORIES

My father used to take me camping on weekends when he could spare time from his research work. We would set up a little two-man pup tent in the big field beside Paint Branch Creek in Berwyn, Maryland, near to the big old house Dad had grown up in. As a child, he had run naked in the woods along this same creek with his little brother, playing Tarzan and Indian Scout. The little creek was named after the soft, colorful stones that were plentiful in its bed. If you rubbed yourself with the wet stones, the color would transfer to your skin. My father told me that the Indians who lived in the area hundreds of years ago used the stones to create colorful designs on their faces and bodies. I did this, too, and it worked really well.

We collected edible mushrooms we found growing within earshot of the creek, and for dinner Dad would cook up a big cast-iron skillet of bacon, hash brown potatoes, onions, and fresh Agaricus campestris, or meadow mushrooms. Dad always taught me their Latin names. Mom never came camping with us, so there was no one to make me go to bed when the sun went down.

There was no air pollution in the area back then, and when the stars came out, the sky blazed with the full glory of creation. Instead of the usual Tarbaby and Mr. Methuselah stories, Dad would point out the constellations and tell me about our galaxy, the Milky Way. And he explained to me the various contending theories of how the universe came to be.

Back then, two of the world’s leading astrophysicists, Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, were still battling it out over whether the universe was born in a big explosion or had always been and would always be continually created in the vastness of space. Fred Hoyle sarcastically referred to George Gamow’s theory of an explosive beginning from a tiny point, which also was the beginning of space and time, as the Big Bang. The phrase stuck, and it also turned out to be the accepted paradigm for the birth of the universe -- at least, of our universe.

To Dad, it mattered little which route God took to bring us into being. What mattered, he explained to me, was that we were here as a result of God’s act of creation, and we could know Him by opening ourselves to experience and appreciate those works.

Not every boy or girl had a scientist father who told them stories every night about Tarbaby and Mr. Methuselah and their adventures together in the Omlatrene or took them camping under the stars and told them all he knew about what they were seeing together in the glorious night sky. So throughout my tales I have included some of my favorite science stories that offer essential clues to the possible answers to the question, Who are we, really?

I’ll tell you my science stories as I might have told them to Piece of Pork and Beers and Captain Jimbo (whom you will meet soon), over a good bottle of Jack Iron, in Stressman’s bar back on the Lance. I hope you enjoy the discoveries they brought me as much as I did.

CHAPTER 4 THE JOURNEY BEGINS

I had no great love for high school. I graduated with an intense distrust of The Establishment, which included politicians, theologians, historians, and most adults. I was far more impressed by Holden Caulfield (of The Catcher in the Rye) than I was by the TV series Father Knows Best. I could empathize much more with the self-fulfilling characters of Henderson The Rain King or Atlas Shrugged than I could with the pontifications of Billy Graham or Barry Goldwater.

It was the beginning of the 1960’s. The libertine, swinging, counter-culture, social revolution decade. Bob Dylan was blowin’ in the wind, Joan Baez was singing Danger Waters, and Mick Jagger had just joined The Rolling Stones. JFK was president, our involvement in Viet Nam was just getting off the