Ep10 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L.Knox stories

In this episode, the speaker reflects on the different perspectives and memories people have of the events in the summer of 1969. They mention their stepbrother and stepsisters, who came from a more sheltered background, and their stepfather's Mormon beliefs, including the practice of polygamy. The speaker also talks about their stepfather's decision to leave his wife and children, and their experiences in San Francisco, including hanging out with friends and trying new foods. They then discuss dropping off their stepbrother and stepsisters with their mother in Utah, and their stepfather's dislike of the LDS Church. They share a story about going shopping and buying new sleeping bags, clothes, and camping gear, but later finding out that their stepfather had no intention of paying the credit card bills. The speaker reflects on the moral implications of these actions. Hey. Episode 10 coming up. I'm gonna talk a bit about still the summer of 69. After last podcast I spoke briefly with my sister and then I spoke with my step brother Joe and then I spoke with my stepsister Julie. So I got, you know, just realizing that we all remember things differently. The same events imprint on each of us in a different way and I'd really like to go into that but I have a hard time with the 15 minutes or 20 minutes. Like the last podcast was half an hour. I wanted to keep it to 20 minutes and a lot of that is because of the culture we're in. People don't, they lose interest, right? So I'm just gonna tell this extension of the story of 1969, the summer of 69. After San Francisco, after the acid trip that Joe and I took and, you know, Jill and Julie Bright, Joe's step, Joe's sisters, my stepsisters were also there. Now those three had come from a very protected life, lifestyle in comparison to what I was experiencing anyway. We had met them the summer before, so when I was 10, 1968. So Bryce was raised in a, my stepfather was raised in a Mormon home, maybe a little bit peculiar in their Mormon or LDS beliefs. A lot of the members of the family held to what they called fundamentalist Mormon doctrine, which included polygamy, so the right of a man or even maybe the responsibility of a man to take more than one wife. Now in our culture that's definitely a, it's been a no-no for a long time. I mean in the history of the Mormon Church and that doctrine is very interesting too, how the United States dealt with that particular, the federal government dealt with that particular doctrine. Regardless, Bryce's immediate family, his mom and dad and his brothers and sisters were not directly involved in a polygamy lifestyle, so a lifestyle of polygamy. Though they did have really close relatives that were, for one, Bryce's uncle, my grandpa Paul's brother was a polygamist, and that's a whole another story, and it's really an interesting story and I will tell it, but not today. So anyway, just to give a background, that's Bryce. He went to school at Brigham Young University. He met his first wife down there in Utah. I'm not sure the circumstances of that, and anyway they married, had three kids, and Bryce decided that he did not want to be, he didn't want to be married and have the responsibility of three kids. I'm not sure that was the only reason. I think he was really bucking the whole Mormon Church thing too, which there's a history that would give him cause to be that way, but for sure his kids and his wife, that was their understanding that he didn't want the responsibility of a wife and three kids, so he just took off. So interesting, when I talked to Julie, she said that that was, meeting us in 68 was a hurtful thing because he had moved out from his marriage to her mother into a relationship with my mother, and she had four kids, so you know, it wasn't, it was like a disconnect for her. I mean, so she was a year younger than Joe and I, so she, you know, I was ten, she would have been nine, so cognizant what was happening, and also on the whole summer of 69 trip, she had a better understanding than anybody else because of her age. Anybody else as far as the kids were concerned, but she, you know, Joe and I, we were 11, we were pretty aware of what was going on. She was ten, she was also pretty aware of what was going on. I think at nine, which was my younger brother's age, and then my sister's four years younger than that, so she would have been like five. It was, for them, I don't know how cognizant they were. I could talk to Jonathan. I think he probably, at nine, would have been cognizant of a lot of what was going on. Anyway, so after we left, after the acid trip, we went back into San Francisco, hung out with our friends, and I remember Woody, she was living there at the time in San Francisco. I don't remember where. She might have been living with Tom. I mean, she was actually in love with Tom. Oh, I got his last name was Walker, too. She was in love with Tom, and he never reciprocated that feeling for her. Tom was pretty much a hedonist. Him and Bryce got along famously. They were pretty much two peas in a pod. Bryce was a little older, though. They were both what I would call bisexuals and very hedonistic in their belief systems. There was also another guy that was madly in love with Tom, too, so we had these two people that we were hanging out with. Claude was his name. Again, that was my impression, that Claude was madly in love with her, him, with Tom. Claude became a very close friend, as well, but lost contact with him when I became a Christian. It wasn't because I became a Christian. It's just I never went back to California, and he lived in California. So, anyway, our date, no, never went back. So after we dropped every... Oh, what I was going to say about Woody is one of the things I remember is going with her to the San Francisco Pier and her raving about a pastrami sandwich, a pastrami sandwich on rye. And I mean, I liked corn beef. I don't know that I'd ever had pastrami at that time, which is another cured beef or pickled beef. Like, there's Montreal smoked, there's pastrami, which I believe also is smoked, and then there's corned beef, which I don't believe is smoked. All very, for me, and I'm also wondering, it's lunchtime. I've been working a bit today, but I have to get this done. So we walked down the pier, and we got these sandwiches that were fresh-baked rye, dark rye bread with spicy mustard and just piled high with pastrami and a giant pickle, like this big, huge dill pickle. And we sat on the wharf there and ate it. And anyway, I have a very clear memory of her and I. I'm sure there was other people there. I don't know who they were. I can't remember. Maybe Joe, maybe Julie, I don't know. Anyway, after we left San Francisco, we took Joe, Julie, and Jill back to their mom, who lived in Utah, Salt Lake City, and dropped them off with her. And I cannot imagine what that was like for them, especially Joe. But Julie did talk about it a bit. There was a huge culture shock traveling with us. Her culture, her feet were firmly established, it sounds, into the LDS lifestyle, way of life. And she saw everything that was wrong in the summer of 69. And I don't know, looking back on it, I see it as wrong, too. At the time, I don't know about the moral distinctions. I don't know, you know, because of my age, because of my, I don't know. On one hand, I'm recognizing I'm cognizant. And on the other hand, I'm going, well, morality, I'm not sure where that fit, where my morality was. I mean, we draw a lot of what we know about morality from our parents. And my mom was wishy-washy with regards to morality. And Bryce, to this day, I don't really believe he has much morality. Probably, I would label him, or having sociopathic behavior, whatever. That's my experience in my history with him, would back it up. Definitely having sociopathic behavior. So, after we dropped off Joe, Julie, and Jill, we went shopping in Salt Lake. Bryce had a hatred for all things LDS. They weren't called LDS at the time, they were called Mormons. He had a hatred for that that was pretty deep-seated. And the mantra of the, one of the mantras of the hippie movement was to F the man, you know. It was like to stick it to the system and, you know, kick buck against authority. And anyway, we went shopping. JCPenney. Bryce had a credit card. He had a credit card for JCPenney and Sears. And he had one for another, I think it was Pazitz, which was an Alabama state, you know, chain. Maybe, maybe the south, southern states. I can't remember. Anyway, they're bankrupt now. But anyway, so we went there and we bought all brand new sleeping bags. We bought all brand new watches for every one of us. And a whole new wardrobe for each of us. And the camping gear, heater, you know, like, catalytic heater, Coleman, Coleman stoves, all kinds of camping gear, toaster, whatever, everything for camping. The sleeping bags we had for years, there was two Dayglo orange and one lime, Dayglo lime green. So there was one for me and one for Vicki and one for Jonathan. And all the clothes, the clothes were wild. They were like 60s, small, schmaltzy, you know, corporate interpretation of hippie, hippiedom. You know, bright, super bright colors, stuff you'd see on TV at the time. What can I think of the, the Smothers Brothers, maybe, or Laugh-In. If you remember those shows, you can, if you're younger and you're watching this, you can always Google Laugh-In. That's where Goldie Hawn got her start. And the Smothers Brothers, they were all, you know, the clothes they were wearing were pretty, anyway, those clothes, hipsters, hip, hip cut, bell bottom jeans and bright, bright colors, not just blue jean colors, but bright, wild colors, patterns, wild patterns on your psychedelic patterns on your shirts. And we bought a ton of clothes for all of us. And then Bryce went to Sears and he bought some tools. And whatever else, I can't remember what all, I mean, we might have bought the camping gear there. I don't remember. I just remember we just spent, like we were taking stuff in and out of the mall, like we'd go in and get stuff and then go take it out and put it in the bus and go back and get more and take it out and put it in the bus. And my memory is that eventually somebody approached us and I can't remember what the, what the, what the gist of it was, but anyway, the intention, it turned out for Bryce and my mom was to, or for Bryce anyway, was to never pay those bills. They were making plans to go to Canada. Their intention was to take all this stuff and go to Canada and not pay their credit card bills. It didn't quite work out that way because credit cards had power in Canada too. Maybe not the stores themselves, but creditors, they have a way of getting stuff. So I didn't get much into a philosophy and what that taught me, but basically I want to say that what I have realized, and I really do want to go deeper into this, was that, you know, there's basically a couple of ways of looking at humanity. Either we're born a blank slate and, you know, each person's born a blank slate and there's no, there's nothing good or bad inherently about them, or else we are born inherently evil or we tend towards corruption, tend towards what is not holy, what is not good. Holy, when I use that word holy, I'm setting it up as God as being the one true example of what is good and right, right? So, and he is called holy. So holy is everything that is good. That's in this context, that's what I'm talking about, everything that is good. And I mean, it's even more than that when you think about it, but that's what I'm talking about. So after that, the other third way that we look at is that people are intrinsically good. They're born good, not a blank slate necessarily, but born inherently good. Now, I don't believe that. I think I've had four kids and now I've got a couple of grandkids and love them all, but even as babies, they were not inherently good. They were inherently selfish. They were inherently self-serving. And so if you believe that there's no connection between God and our creator and the creation, and it's all, we're just random allocation of molecules that have accidentally come together and we've formed life and crawled out of the slime and and evolved. I mean, if that's your belief and God plays no part in that, well, then that's all, that's fine. That's good. Who cares if you're inherently selfish? Selfish is self-preserving. I believe that we, all of us intrinsically know that selfishness is not a good quality. So, all of these actions, you know, I talk about, all the things that happen in the summer, we're 99% controlled by selfishness, self-serving, hedonistic ideas, wanting to feed our flesh. And again, my point of view is that that's not a good thing, that it's not what would produce a truly loving, caring society, a truly loving, caring humanity, one that nurtures good in people. So, that's my perspective, right? So, to learn to put aside selfishness and, oh man, it is difficult to do because we all have, back to those conversations, we all have those conversations in our head and who are we talking to, you know? Like, back to that song I talked about, like, everybody's, you know, living in their own head. We're all talking to ourselves. We're all talking to God. We're all talking to demons or demonic powers or, you know, we're talking to somebody. So, all those conversations, you know, I know, everybody knows that there's not inherent goodness. There's some goodness and there's a lot of not-so-goodness in our thoughts and in our way we live. Anyway, I'm going to get on with it. I've went a little long again, but I don't know what song I'm going to do. It'll be a song though. The next one will be 11. Okay, thanks a lot. Hey, I just re-watched the, or I just watched the video that I did earlier and before I post it, I wanted to clarify something. When I was talking about Salt Lake City and the Mormon Church, I wanted, in my mind, I was thinking that Bryce related the two pretty closely. My opinion, he related the two pretty closely. So, when he thought of ripping off JCPenney and Sears, it was relevant to him that we went to the stores that were in Salt Lake City. He felt like that was bruising the heel of the Mormon Church. He had such disdain for that organization that he lumped it in with the F the Man attitude. I'm going to do a song by Bruce Coburn. It's called All the Diamonds. It's a song that I really like. I think it illustrates or presents the missionary journey towards Christian faith very well. I like the imagery and I like the music. So, it's a Bruce Coburn song and I hope you enjoy it. All the diamonds in the world All the diamonds in this world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in this world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea I ran aground In a harder town Lost the taste Of the sea Thank God He sent Some gold chasers To carry me To sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in this world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in this world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea All the diamonds in the world That mean anything to me Are conjured up By the wind and sun That's falling Along the sea Like a bird In a sea Of moonlit Shadows Come Shining Like a Crystal In the sky Of sun's Condition Come Shining Like a Crystal In the sky Of sun's Condition