Ep20 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L.Knox stories

In episode 20, the narrator goes back to when they were 12 and living in Qualicum Beach, Canada. They talk about the transformation of the area from a raw land to a popular destination, especially for hippies. The narrator and their brother Joe stayed there and befriended people, including a drug dealer named Chuck. They spent their time getting high on different drugs and hitchhiking between Qualicum and Tofino. They eventually left the west coast and stayed in a communal house in North Vancouver, where they partied and listened to a pirate FM radio station. The narrator also mentions a moment when they took a large amount of MDA and thought they were dying. Hey, episode 20, we're into 2024, so the 21st century rages on. So I'm going to go back in my story back to some more stuff that happened when I was 12. When we first came into Canada, I already mentioned before we stayed on a piece of raw land that was pretty much in the middle of Qualicum Beach. Now it's all houses there, but at the time it was all bush. We could walk through the bush and there was the the hermitage. As we lived in Qualicum and summer progressed, it became well known throughout the world really, but especially on the west coast, that the west coast of Vancouver Island was a fantastic place. It had Wreck Bay. That Wreck Bay is now called Florencia Bay and it's part of the national park over there, the Pacific Rim National Park, I think is what they call it. But at the time it wasn't a national park. Hippies were flocking to Wreck Bay on the west coast of Vancouver Island and we were part of that group. We went over there as a family and stayed for a while and it was really interesting, a lot of interesting stuff there. It's like one end of the beach had been taken over by, it had been populated. It had been populated by what I would call beatniks. So that was pre-flower children, pre-hippie type of people. They were fatalists, typically fatalists, depressed, jazz, not rock, poetry, and good art and stuff. My mom and my stepfather had been part of that movement in Alabama before and so they knew this one fellow that was there. He was from New York. He was a reasonably famous artist from New York that they had met in Birmingham. So we took up some friendships with those people, but on their main part of the beach, probably 75% of the beach, it was hippies. And the hippies were different. They were free love and happy and lots of drugs and like lots of drugs. There was so much drug use on on Wreck Bay at that time, kind of astounding. I think we stayed as a family for a while and then when mom and Bryce and the two younger kids went back to Qualicum, Joe and I stayed there and met just a ton of people. Joe and I, like what was happening was people were building houses, shacks out of driftwood and clear poly and black poly and whatever they could find. And some of them were like amazing, like more than one room. And there was a stream, a creek that came down. And so a lot of them sort of were right near that where the creek was because that was a good water source. And some people were building residences up into the forest. So it was up on a, you know, you had to climb down to get to the beach. It was up a kind of a cliff and then a hill up to the top of where the land leveled off. But on that hill in those forests, they were building cabins and stuff that were more permanent. Still, you might consider them temporary, but they were more permanent. And last time I went to Wreck Bay, it seemed like there was still remnants of those cabins in the bushes. It's been a while since I've been there. Like I said, it's called Florencia Bay now. So while we were there, Joe and I, we met a lot of people and it seemed like every single day we were getting high on something. It was acid and mescaline and mushrooms and MDA. That was the first time I ever took MDA, which would be, if not the same, almost the same thing as what they call MDMA today or ecstasy. It was a euphoric drug. It made you feel euphoric. A lot like cocaine, but more chemical and stronger, maybe. Definitely stronger. And I met a fellow whose name was Chuck and he was a dealer. Chuck and I, I don't even know how it happens. Like I'm a 12 year old kid and he's, you know, mid to mid twenties to early thirties. And he's got money and he had a van, you know, it was decked out with a bed in the back and seemed like it had a bench, a partial bench up towards the front, but it was a hippie van. And he had just tons of drugs. I mean, I'm not talking marijuana. I'm talking psychedelics and MDA and speed. He had all kinds of stuff and he was providing it to the beach. And for some reason, and I don't, I don't know if Joe was part of that too. I don't remember him, but this guy would, would give me drugs. You know, he didn't ask me to pay for them. He just was giving it to me. I liked that. So I became friends with him and sort of followed around, followed him around, you know, as the beach cleared off, Joe and I moved into abandoned shelters and there was other people that had stayed around. Gina, that's where I met Gina. There was another guy, Al, which I would talk about later. And I think, I think at the same time that I was becoming friends with Chuck, Joe was becoming closer friends with Al. I'm not sure. I did ask Joe that and I don't remember what he, what he said, but that was my memory. Now, Al became a close family friend. And as the commune or the two communes developed, he, he was, he was around both of those. But Chuck and I, and a group of maybe four or five people started hanging out quite a bit together. During that time, we would, Joe and I, or Gina and I, or whoever, we would hitchhike back and forth between Qualicum and, and Tofino. It wasn't a pleasant journey and to hitchhike it was even less pleasant. There was no paved road out there at the time. It was old logging roads that they had, you know, pieced together so you could get out there to the west coast. So Tofino was a, was a fishing village. Ukulit was a fishing village. Lots of First Nations. As time went on and I became an adult, I got to know the McDermott family and, and work for them. And they, they bought a lot of that land. Dr. McDermott, he was the doctor out there. He also became an MLA. He pushed for it to become a park, a national park. That was part of his, his legacy, I guess. I think he was an MLA. He might have been an MP, but I think he was an MLA. And later I worked for them. They, they owned the Wiccan Inish, not the original Wiccan Inish, the Wiccan Inish Inn that they built on Chesterman's Beach, I guess it's called, which a lot of people go there and surf. That's one of the good surfing beaches. Anyway, as, as time went on, you know, this would be getting towards fall and the weather was turning and it wasn't as nice to be there. So I ended up coming back to the east side of the island and with, with Chuck and he had a, a girlfriend and she went on ahead from Qualcomm. She, I think she was from North Van and there was another, at least one other guy, I think there was two guys that were from North Van. One's name, one of the guy's name was, was Tom and he was older. He was like mid to late thirties, like pushing 40. He was kind of stoic and he seemed quite wise to me. And he actually, along with, with Chuck befriended me and he, he, he was more a protector. Like he was looking out for me. Chuck was, um, I'm not sure what his motivation was. He was pretty hedonistic. He, he just wanted money and drugs and a good time. And that's how he lived. At one point I went with Chuck and Tom and I, the other guy's name I think was Don and he was from North Van too. So Tom and Don and the girlfriend's name was Fiona. And there was one other person and I just vaguely see their face. I just cannot remember who they were. It was another guy. It was like Fiona was the only woman. Anyway, when we got to North Van and we went to, I believe it was Don's place, he seemed to come from money. I think Tom might've come from money too, but he wasn't definitely not living like he had a lot of money. And Don's place there, you know, it was pretty nice in North Van and lots of, they had a couple of cars and they were nice cars and very nice house. So in the seventies, there was a lot of residences there, but it wasn't like it is now up on the, up on the slopes on the hill there in North Vancouver. So we stayed there for a while and we, we, uh, partied and did stuff in Vancouver. We went to concerts and eventually we would leave there and go stay in another house that was sort of a communal house. And that communal house was really interesting. It had a FM radio station in the, in the basement. And I don't know exactly what was happening politically then, but the guy that ran the radio station was anti-government. He was, uh, he was aggressively anti-government. And he, he would, you know, for one or two hours a day, he would come on, he would go on the radio station. And my memory was that it wasn't always the same time, but it ends up that that radio station was 99.9. So that was the Fox, what has become the Fox now, which I find really interesting because he would play pirated music, you know, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, stuff that wasn't being played on, on AM or, you know, FM really wasn't a thing yet. It was just becoming a thing. We would do drugs in the house and have parties. And he, uh, he also, he had some plan for a uprising or revolt or something, and he had been making Molotov cocktails and they were all stored in the basement. I can remember working on them with him because he would grade, grade, um, ivory soap and then put a bunch of ivory soap in the Molotov cocktails. And he said that turned it into a, like a napalm. The soap would become a gel and it would stick to whatever it was thrown at. Right. It was an interesting time. Like I said, I'm not sure what the political reasons for that were or the motivation. We spent a lot of time in that house and we would leave and we would come back. So it was me and Tom and, uh, and Chuck stayed there, but we still, like Fiona was still around, but she didn't stay there regularly. One night we were going to a concert and I don't remember who it was. When we were getting ready to go, there was me and Fiona and Tom and, and, uh, Don, and we'd all taken just a huge amount of, uh, MDA and we were snorting it. We got in the van and we were getting ready to go. And I felt my heart just racing. And I, I thought I was dying. I remember, like, I was afraid. My heart was just pounding and pounding. I said, I think I took too much. I think I'm dying. Chuck's response was so far out. Just go with it, man. And Fiona's response was like, she slapped Chuck on the arm and said, Chuck. And, uh, she came back. I was in the back of the van and she came back in the back of the van and she began to stroke my hair and sort of caress me, cuddle me and said, don't worry, you're okay. You're okay. Just hang in there. And, uh, sort of encouraged me to get through that peak. I did. I didn't die, obviously. But it changed the way that I viewed Chuck. Like, I remember that. I don't remember the concert. I don't remember anything after that, except for just being so freaking angry. I don't remember Tom saying anything. I don't remember Don saying anything. I don't, I just remember Chuck and Fiona and Chuck's like, Chuck's reaction was, I felt like betrayed or cast aside or like I wasn't like I wasn't important or something like that. And it sort of affected the way that, not that I just thought about Chuck, but about life in general. And the thing about MDA is like, you can take LSD and you can, you know, when you come down, you feel down, you feel depleted, and you might have some slight depression. And the same with mescaline. I don't even remember ever feeling depression after taking mescaline or peyote or any of those things, but those sort of organically based hallucinogens. But MDA is a pure chemical. It's a manmade chemical. And it didn't, it didn't sit well with me. I loved it. I would, I took it and like, we were taking it every day. We were just getting so high every single day. Again, I'm not, I don't know why. I don't know why Chuck would share that with me. That episode changed the way that I viewed all of my relationships. Actually, I began again, to feel more like I was on my own. It, it drove me into some pretty severe depression. What drove me to the depression, I'm almost 100% sure was the use of excessive use of MDA. And any use of MDA by a 12 year old, I would say is excessive. So it was not, it was not a healthy thing. I began to journal at that time. As I look back on that, and where I am today, I see my family, and I see the world that we live in today. And the, I see the way that our culture has moved into into nihilism. So my understanding, as I matured and became an adult, and began to look more at, look more deeply into philosophy, and those philosophers of the past that laid the foundation for how our culture is, how our culture acts and reacts today. And I see the influence of a man like Frederick Nietzsche, that's produced such a attitude of nihilism, nihilistic beliefs, there's nothing. And even people that claim to have beliefs in God, there's nothing. And even people that claim to have beliefs in God, they live as though there is no God. Anyway, as a child, or as a 12 year old, it developed into a sense of futility. I don't know that I would have used that word at that time. I'm using that word now because of the studying that I'm doing right now. And I just started reading Romans again. And Romans one speaks of the futility. I'm going to, I want to play, this is the Bible. It's on my phone. And it also has an audible so I can read and listen at the same time. I'm just going to play the audible of this is Romans one. I'm starting it from 16 here. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, but the righteous man shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them. For God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. So Romans, more than any other book in the New Testament, will explain the doctrines of Christianity. He becomes very clear about the belief system. I often talk about building idols and I talk about worshiping the earth, worshiping the creation, and this he's talking about that, like man knowing God, like intrinsically knowing God. This is what he says in Romans 1, that we intrinsically know God, we're born knowing God, at least knowing that there is a God that created us, and so as we move out of our childhood lives into a mature man or woman, we develop these belief systems, and what he's saying there is that those systems we choose to worship the creation rather than the creator, or we choose to worship ourselves as often where it is, and he talked there about the futility of the mind. Now that relates in my world, in my view, that relates to the Romans 8 that I talked about last week, the whole earth groaning, all of creation groans, all of creation groans for God to make things right, and now let's understand something like the creation, like a seagull doesn't think about what it takes to be a seagull. The seagull is a seagull, or a clam is a clam. It doesn't think about what it takes to be a clam. It doesn't develop philosophies, or it just is a clam, and it does what a clam is supposed to do. Now man is different. We have free will and this creative mind, this mind created in the image of God. We have this ability to make decisions and create and think and develop ideas far more extensively than any of the other creatures on the planet. We're considered the dominant life form, the higher life form. Now there are other life forms, and I'm not going to talk about, you know, porpoises or dolphins or whales and elephants and chimpanzees. We know they have higher intelligence than others, but humanity makes these choices and we move in our in our path according to the choices that we make. Now it's important that we realize now that this comes back to worldview. The things that we say we believe, if we don't implement them, if we don't work to implement them in our lives, then it's just a game. It's just doublespeak. It's not like it's not real, and this is the passion. Like he talks about that I'm not ashamed of the gospel. That's the very first thing he says there. He's not ashamed of the gospel because it is truth. It's the truth of God. It's the power of God. It's the story of God. So I'm not ashamed of it either, and I want to talk about it, and it relates to everything. It relates to what's happening in Israel right now. I had a really interesting conversation with some people last night about Israel and Hamas and Russia and Iran. I mean you want to know the Bible talks about this stuff. There's prophecies that haven't been fulfilled yet. Ezekiel 38. Read Ezekiel 38. Gog and Magog. Magog is Russia. You can look in the Bible and figure out where Magog is. It's Russia. It's north. It's the northern eastern Europe, and Gog is the leader of Russia. Read that. I recommend like a new living translation or something, but interesting stuff. Like this is stuff that needs to happen yet. That being a 12-year-old and realizing there was a certain sense of futility in life, that you're on your own, it adds loneliness, and we're all alone. We're all on our own. I mean even though we have people around us, when we lie in bed at night and we close our eyes and we go to sleep, we're in our own minds. We're reflecting on whatever it is we're reflecting on, whether it's the television show that you watched or the book that you were reading or the sense of emptiness that you have or the hope that you can rectify poor relationships that you have with your loved ones. Whatever it is, that's you, and that's often the time where we reflect on what is real, what is true, and that's the time when we think about God. That's the time when we, you know, unless we've come to that place where we go, there is no God or I want nothing to do with God. That's more like what it is normally. A lot of people will not say there is no God. It's just they don't want to deal with that. They don't want anything to do with that, and that's, you know, a status quo for humanity. Status quo. But like I said before, we all have the questions. So what do we do about that futility? Well, let's look at that as we go on. The stories in my life, all they did, like a lot of these stories I'm telling, all they did was reinforce that sense of futility. I mean, when I was 12, how deep was I? I don't know. I don't know how deep other 12-year-olds are. I mean, I can look and see videos online of these prodigies and these intelligent and outgoing and artistic, you know, 12-year-olds, 11-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and I don't know. I don't know where you were at 13 or 12. That's something you can reflect back on and think about how you were. Anyway, 2024. Who to thunk it, right? Okay. We're on for, I'm sure we're on for a real amazing ride this year. So let's stand for liberty, freedom, truth, and love. Okay. See you next time. 21. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no The level of your love changed Said I need something that's easier Something I can hold on to Without letting go of who I am Cause that's your voice to hear And the Lord says You gotta hear me when I call You gotta hear me when I say your name You gotta see me now I'm ready now You got a lot of choosing to do No time for you to run anymore You must decide Decide what you're living for There's no time to know If you're still young Cause the road is narrow There's no time The road is narrow There's no time The gate is narrow There's no time It's not as hard as the world would have you to believe Gotta let go Be my need Let God know you wanna be free Oh, oh don't you understand He wants you to take a stand And I am just one voice And if you don't hear me You're making a choice Cause I'm just one voice You're making a choice Doesn't have to be so difficult to tell Taught you nothing It cost him everything You make your choice You make your choice You make your choice You make your choice and live or die Doesn't have to be so difficult to tell Taught you nothing It cost him everything It cost him nothing It cost him everything Don't you know You make your choice You make your choice And you live, you live, you live You live or you die You live or you die You live or you die You live or you die