Ep3 In The Shadow Of The Mountain, C.L.Knox stories

The speaker talks about their experiences living with the Jesus People's Army during their teenage years. They discuss the daily studies and church services they attended while living in a dorm with adult men. They also mention being billeted out to live with a Catholic woman. After returning to their hometown, they went back to school and made friends. They mention carrying a Bible and having fear due to their understanding of the end times. The speaker then discusses their involvement with drugs and drinking during their teenage years, including a specific experience with smoking hash and having a flashback to a previous LSD trip. They also mention their relationship with their mother and how she showed compassion during a difficult time. So, here we are, episode three. Last episode, first two episodes I talked about when I was 13, or just before my 13th birthday, then my 13th birthday, and then going to Vancouver, and getting caught up in the Jesus People's Army. And in that, I said that I went home after a few weeks, which I did, but after my dad left, if you listened to the last one, I said I went home from Vancouver. After my dad left and went back to Alabama, I did end up going back and living with the Jesus People's Army for the summer, right through until, I guess, October, when I came back to live with my family at the commune in Qualicum. So, when I went back and I lived with them for the summer and into the fall, the whole time was a time of learning for me. They had daily studies and then church twice on Sunday, and I lived in a dorm with a bunch of men, until they decided that it wasn't right for a 13-year-old to be living with these adult men, so they billeted me out, and I went to live with a Catholic woman. She was a widow. She had a few kids, sons, I don't think she had daughters, and so I stayed with her, and she taxied me around, took care of me, fed me, although I ate most of my meals with the Jesus People's Army. It was an interesting time. When I did come back to Qualicum, I went back to school in grade 7, which is when I met a bunch of the people that are now my peers in the town that I live in. Some of them knew some of the stuff, like I said, I carried a Bible with me for the first year and a bit. I carried it with me all the time. Actually, I carried one with me most of the time anyway, but I carried that one on my belt, and I said Revelation, the book of Revelation, but it wasn't just Revelation, it was actually more the Gospels, the actual things that Jesus said in Matthew 24, Luke 21, and Mark 13. Jesus talked about the last days, and there's a part in there where it says, flee to the mountains, don't turn back, and I've come to understand something about that since then, and maybe I'll talk about that later, but there was a sense of trepidation about this sudden change and the beginning of a judgment that was going to come on the world. I carried a bit of fear, and it was an interesting fear because I had complete faith in my understanding of who Jesus was, but it did give me some fear, so that's just filling in some gaps back there. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or phone me. A couple of people actually have asked me some questions, so that's interesting. Feel free. Most of you are getting this on Facebook, so you can message me or email me, maybe. I think the email's included in this podcast platform, I think. I don't know. It's all new for me. So anyway, three years after I came back to Qualicum, so I lived three years, grade 7, 8, and 9, went to Qualicum Elementary and then Qualicum High for grade 8 and 9, met a lot of people. Some of them, like I said, are still friends, did a lot of stuff. I had quit doing drugs and drinking and stuff when I was 13. Sounds kind of funny, I know, but... So then I did start drinking again. I was playing music, so I was playing with other people from school and got in a band, played music with a group of people from the commune, and then the commune broke up and still played music, did some recording, which I'll probably go into later. Anyway, all originals at that time. Then when I was about 15, so that would have been between grade 8 and 9, I guess, I did start drinking. It was a big part of being a teenager in Qualicum Beach at that time, lots of drink. There was a lot of marijuana and stuff happening too, but I wasn't doing that. Did drink a lot of five-star rye, I don't even think they have that anymore, it was the cheapest rye you could get, it was pretty bad, but we drank a lot of it, and drove around and did things where every year people got killed from drinking and driving, it was like frenzy years, you know, in the summer, whatever, that's sad stuff, more stories. Anyway, when I was 16, 15, 16, I think it was, there was five of us, we were at my neighbor's house and they had a bus that was camperized, and so there was me and Tammy and Kathy and Kevin and Roma in this bus, and Kevin, I think it was Kevin, he had some hashish and they were toking up on the hash, and you know, come on, have a toke with us, you never toke with us, and so, anyway, I did, peer pressure, I guess, you know, peer pressure plays heavy on teenagers, it did then and I'm sure it does now, so it's something to be aware of, and anyway, I was aware of it, and yet I did smoke that hash with them, and then after smoking it, it was like, it was like it brought on just this huge flashback for me, so flashback is when you take psychedelics, in particular LSD, years later you can have a flashback to the trip you had, so it still happens to me today, there's certain places I go or things, if I'll hear a song or smells that'll cause me to flashback to something that happened to me when I was a preteen, an LSD trip or mescaline or whatever, so in this particular case when we smoked the hash, we're all in the bus, and the bus was parked in a position where you could see Mount Aerosmith, at the time, both our farm and the farm next door, the trees were, had been cut down, they weren't, there was trees there on the bank, but they weren't tall, they didn't block the view to the mountain, so you could see Mount Aerosmith, and the sun was setting, and the sky turned all orange, and I flashed on a couple of things, one was the scriptures that I just talked about, from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, where Jesus talked about the end times, and I thought, I flashed to an LSD trip I had had when I was 12 in Mendocino, on the beaches of Mendocino, which is Northern California, well, Middle California, and that trip, I thought the end of the world had come, we tripped all night long, and that was a bizarre one, because we'd actually tripped all day, and then when we ended our trip, it was such a great experience that we took some more of a different kind of acid, which wasn't as good, like, I don't know if you remember in Woodstock, where the guy gets up and he says, yeah, the brown acid that's going around, it's not particularly good, so you might want to avoid that, well, that's kind of what happened in Mendocino, we had a really good trip with this green stuff, and then we took these purple tablets, and so it was going to be 24 hours pure tripping, and it was a very speedy kind of a trip, so that in the end of that trip, when the sun was coming up, a big plane flew over, and it had a big radar thing or sonar thing on the top of it, they still use those surveillance or reconnaissance planes, I don't know what they're for, but it flew over, it was quite low, and the sky was orange, and I freaked, I mean, it was the end of the trip, we weren't peaking anymore, but I thought, this is, something's happened, this is the end of the world, I thought, at that time, I said, somebody bombed the, there's a couple of nuclear power plants outside of Berkeley, I said, somebody bombed the nuclear power plants, or they exploded, or something, and so I thought we were all gonna be fried, it was a not a very pleasant way to end 24 hours of tripping, but that's what happened, so when we were in the bus, and the sky turned orange, and I looked at the mountain, I began to flash back onto that, and also back onto the Jesus's talking about the end days, last days, end of time, whatever, I don't remember how it's worded exactly, and I freaked, after the sun went down, the mountain, the back of the mountain lit up, like Port Alberni's on the other side of the mountain, and the whole sky just turned, it started to glow from the city, from the lights of Port Alberni. Now at that time, between us, our property, and then there was the river, and the valley, and then between us, and Mount Washington, there was virtually nothing, no houses, no buildings, there was no light to interfere with what was coming from the mountain, so it was, to me, it was a bright glow coming from the mountain, and I thought, this is the end, so there was some trepidation, because here I was, smoking pot, and I said, you know, sort of committed to not doing that anymore, when I became a Christian, but so I freaked, and I left, I left the bus, I left the other four there, they must have thought I was pretty weird, I never did talk to any of them about that, what they thought about it, that I can remember, and I went home, and my mom knew as soon as I came in, that something was up. Now I had a very interesting relationship with my mom, she had invested some of her belief in this system, this community called Summerhill, which adopted the philosophy of letting kids do whatever they wanted, and she had implemented that philosophy in my life, starting when I was about 10. She didn't do it so much with my younger brothers and sisters, my younger brother and sister, but, and Steve, my older brother, he was living with my dad, he went to live with my dad, so I got the full brunt of this experimental sort of philosophy of letting me do whatever I want. And that's how a lot of the interesting stories that I have came to be from me having complete liberty, liberty as an adult, basically. So anyway, I went home, and my mom, though sometimes I didn't, I wondered about her, her care for me, because she didn't protect me, you know, she didn't, you know, she adopted this philosophy. But anyway, at that particular time, she, she was very compassionate, and she had me lie down, lay down on her bed, and she just rubbed my back and talked to me, soothing, calming, and I knew, you know, I was fully aware that she cared deeply for me, that she loved me. It imprinted my, my life. It was an imprint, you know, it imprinted me. So after that, I, within a few weeks, months, whatever, I was back smoking pot and hash and doing blow. And I never did any, like, MDA or anything like that again, that I can remember. But I did do peyote and psilocybin and edible THC. And those were like, you know, those were pretty heavy for me, because I had this, like, pre, whatever, pre exposure that made it made me sensitive to that stuff, I guess. So anyway, that started a whole new chapter in my life from 16 to actually right before I got married. That's another 15 minutes of my story. And I hope you enjoyed it. And so I just I want to keep going. But that's enough. I got a good song coming up. This is a song I wrote, I'm going to tell you a little bit about it before I publish it. So we're going to run a little over time. This is a song I wrote for, there was a guy that I, once I had kids, I followed him, he's a psychologist, and he was a Christian. And he had an adopted son, and the adopted son sort of estranged himself from, from the family. And he told this story. And it would have been in the 90s that he told the story. And I, it just, it pulled on my heartstrings. And I wrote a song, I never finished the song. And then when my dad died, I picked that song back up, and I rewrote it and he died in 2010. No, yeah, 2010. And then I put it away, I never did anything with it. And then when my youngest turned 16, and we had a, we had a separate separation, there's sort of a semi estrangement that happened when he was 16. And I finished the song, and I've tweaked it a few times. Anyway, this song sort of relates to that, the sadness of estrangement, sadness of loss and, and a desire from, from, from my point of view, for something eternal, like a relationship eternal. Anyway, the song is called Ryan Be There. Enjoy it. Talk to you next time. Truth or lie, I wonder why, oh, Ryan, what are you there for? What you do, who you are, question asked, or did you soon be a man? You want to know the truth of life, you need to find out what it is that makes you real. When you taste that bitter fruit, sweet to the tongue and it's death to the soul, know what it is, this selfish strife, know what it does, this prior life, it's choices made and chances taken and decisions made are in the making, oh, Ryan, Ryan Be There. Some pains become unbearable, for life's short span to take. Grief rips, grief tears, and leaves you flat, just like a nail. Let rust be rust and let gold fade, it's diamonds, cards and clothes, take hold of my hand and lead me, Ryan Be There, oh, Ryan, Ryan Be There. What you do, who you are, the question's asked, what it means to be a man, want to know the truth of life, you need to find out what it is that makes you real. And on the other side, you watch the river passing by, I see it deep and I see it wide, oh, Ryan Be There. My life like yours was fraught with pain and rife with joy and both were gained, but when I stand in glory's light, oh, Ryan Be There, oh, Ryan, Ryan Be There, oh, Ryan, Ryan Be There, oh, Ryan, Ryan Be There.