Ep5 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L.Knox stories

In this episode, the narrator discusses his time coaching kids on the recreation fields in Qualicum Beach and his love for spending time with young people. He also talks about his interest in philosophy and theology and how the two disciplines are interconnected. He shares about his family's move to Canada and the start of a commune on a property owned by his stepfather's father. He mentions various characters on the commune, including Tui, a New York Jew who taught them a game called Scully, and a Japanese family who were artists. He also mentions a family trip where they all took mescaline, a mild hallucinogen. Overall, the narrator reflects on how these experiences shaped his worldview. Chapter, no, episode five. So I'm sitting in my truck again. It seemed like it worked pretty good last time as far as the quality of the sound and even the recording seemed better. I was more comfortable with it. I'm sitting at the recreation fields in Qualicum Beach. I mentioned earlier that I coached all my kids. I spent over 25 or so plus years, I spent a lot of time on these fields. And I loved it. Most of it I loved. There was some, you know, I haven't gotten into that later part about my story yet either but there was later in my life I suffered from some pretty severe depression and even through that I still was coaching and spending a lot of time with young people. That had been a goal in my life when I was a teenager. I had thought I wanted to be a counselor and as I grew into my twenties and got to know some counselors and actually got involved in amateur counseling, I realized that we all do that. We all share our wisdom. We all share our experiences and it's part of learning. And again, it's back to that thread that I talked about before. I kind of visualize it as a golden thread that weaves through my life and I describe that as my relationship to God and how God utilized experiences in my life to produce the man that I am, to get me to where I am. So today I'm going to share a little bit about the beginnings of my thinking processes, how I got to where I wanted to pursue philosophy and related to that theology for decades, not decades, for eons, for hundreds of years people have associated the two studies, philosophy and theology. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, and theology, the love of God, are both of them, the study of wisdom and the study of God. Those two disciplines interact with each other in a parallel reality. They are like cousins or brothers and sisters or whatever. And in the days that we live now, people cast off theology. They don't even acknowledge that they practice it. I've had many discussions with people who would say, oh, I don't believe in theology even, you know, like I don't believe in God, so why would I be studying God? Again, upon deeper examination, I would question statements like that and that's a philosophical statement and a theological statement to say you don't believe in God. So as I progress with this story, you're going to get a bit of the idea of how I formed my way of thinking, the beginnings of it. So I want to go start with this, the purchase of the property that became the commune. Interesting, we were living on some property that belonged to my stepfather's father, so my grandfather, in Qualcomm Beach, right in town. He owned a couple of city blocks of raw land, which was all zoned to be lots and is now, I mean, it's all little houses, little tiny lots and houses. And he built one of the houses there. He built it in 1970, 71. He built it of recycled lumber or recycled materials, even nails, back in the 70s. He was definitely ahead of his time. Some people would have called him a yuppie, which you can look that up if you've never heard that term before, sort of an older hippie at the time of the hippies. So we lived on his property. We brought our bus up from Alabama and lived in that. It had four bunk beds and there was a little cabin next to the property that my grandfather was building on, the lot that he was building on. And so we lived in that cabin. My folks slept in the cabin and all the kids slept in the bus and there was a little cooking area in the cabin. And a bunch of people followed us, followed me and Hoagie. Hoagie was the guy that I knew from Alabama and went to California with, the 21-year-old. I don't think I said his name last time. So these people that were people Hoagie and I met followed us up here and Hoagie was telling everybody, come to Canada with us, we're going to start a commune. So we ended up with all kinds of people following us. And it was contrary to my parents' vision, Bryce and my mom, that wasn't their vision. So when they met all these people at the border in Seattle, it was a bit of a shock to them and they were committed to Hoagie. That was it. So there's so many stories in there and I want to talk about each one of those characters because they're all characters. I mentioned Peter, he was one and he's still here in Qualicum. I really do need to look him up, I haven't seen him in quite a while. We went different directions philosophically as I matured and he matured. But anyway, we ended up buying, we spent that whole summer, that first summer when we came up here, pretty much all of it was, for me and for Joe anyway, was spent on Wreck Bay on the West Coast. And at that time, the West Coast wasn't a national park. There was a move by the MP, I think he was, he might, no, MLA, I can't remember if he was an MP or an MLA, I got to know him later anyway, McDermott. He was involved in, he really wanted to get this park, national park set up on the West Coast of the island. And now part of me says, oh, it was a good idea and part of me says, what a bad idea. But you know what? As we progress, we lose the wildness of everything as we live on this planet. But then after the summer, we came back, Joe and I were traveling around a lot, in my memory, and my parents bought the farm, which we call the farm, and a commune was started there. When we first took possession of the farm, there was only, I think, Tui living there and probably Peter. And Tui was living in his camper and I think Peter was just living in a tent or sleeping in the barn or whatever, I don't remember. I think he was in a tent. Eventually we got cabins, which is another story. But so he lived, they lived there and when we got possession of the property, we moved into this old house, really interesting, you know, post-war farmhouse, two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. And in the kitchen, there was a little spot for a dining table. So we put four bunks into one of the bedrooms and my stepfather and my mother took the other bedroom. In the one, we had me and Joe and Vicki and Jonathan lived. That was our space. What happened when we took possession was we did a, the whole family took mescaline. So mescaline is a hallucinogen that's more, it's more, it's milder than LSD. I imagine if you took enough, you would experience LSD type stuff. It is a hallucinogen, it's a psychedelic drug. And so the whole family took it. It was the first time our whole family had done anything like that together. And my memory is that Tui did not take it and he was sort of the, you know, it's nice to have somebody that's not stoned sort of watching over everybody. And he was that guy, he just watched over us, especially with us kids taking it. I don't remember, I remember parts of the, what happened during that, that trip. I remember relating to Tui quite a bit in the trip and we, I feel like we established a relationship from that. But another thing that happened was our family established a sort of a nucleus kind of relationship. We were a, we were a mixed family. We had Bryce and his oldest son, and then my mom and her three younger kids. And we were on this adventure to create a new life in Canada. So it was, it was cool. It was, you know, I remember Vicki in particular, I don't remember if that was the first time she took hallucinogens or if the time where, you know, in California where she was giving it inadvertently. I don't know if it was inadvertently, but she was giving it without my mom knowing and consenting to her taking it. So that was not a good trip, the acid trip for my sister. And I was stoned on that one too. Yeah, and I think that one was after, after the mescaline. So she was six, pretty young to be experiencing those kind of things, but, and my brother would have been 10 and I would have been 12 and Joe was 12. So I want to talk a bit about TUI, about some of the people that ended up being on the commune because they helped, these people helped me view my worldview or form my worldview. So to how I see the world, there was all different cultures represented in this, in this commune. It was really unique and interesting and a lot of good things happened there. So TUI was a New York Jew. He was Jewish man. I believe he was in his early 20s at that time. And he had Jewish heritage, interesting culture and character. He taught us a lot about street life, like growing up in, in New York. I don't know if it was Brooklyn. I don't know where it was. I don't remember him having a, having an accent, Brooklyn. I don't remember any of that, but he taught us Scully. We painted a Scully board on the, on the basement floor of the barn. Scully was a game we played with bottle caps. So we all were into collecting interesting bottle caps and we had collections of them. I don't remember the premise of the game of Jonathan, my brother, me. I don't remember. I just remember spending hours playing that when it was raining, we would be downstairs in the basement of the barn playing Scully. When it wasn't raining, we would be outside playing whatever, soccer or bocce ball or all different kinds of things. Then there was a Japanese family. There was Isamu Fusaku and they had three daughters and they were down in the lower field. Isamu was a famous, so I was told, a very famous or fairly famous Japanese artist. He was a painter, a carver. He made bamboo flutes. He did all kinds of stuff. He was one of the most artistic people I knew and his wife was pretty artistic too. There was a couple of women that did batiking in my memory. Fusaku was one. She did batiking that was very impressive. Most of the people on the property had artistic bent and craftsmanship. Bryce was a musician, a carpenter and an artist. My mom wasn't, but she was of the ilk of intellectuals that like to hang out with artists. Perhaps I think she probably could have been a writer, but she wasn't. I don't recall her ever doing much of anything artistic, though she was very smart. Then there was another lady from Denmark who came. She didn't come right away. She was the girlfriend of Mino. I believe Mino may have been from Europe originally too. I don't know what his nationality is or was. I think he's still alive. From what I hear, he's alive and living in Berkeley and actually he and Fusaku took up because Isamu and Fusaku divorced and Isamu went back to Japan where he later died of cancer. Their three girls grew up and one became a model. I haven't seen these people in ages. These are just what I was told from my mom who reconnected with them. Tui lives in Santa Rosa. Mino and Fusaku live in Berkeley. They're still on the planet. They may hear this and perhaps I shouldn't be using their name, but most people won't know who they are anyway. There was also another family from New York. It was Charlie and Linda. Charlie was New York Italian for sure. I think Linda was as well. I'm not sure if she was Italian, but she was from New York as well. They were on the property. Then there was a woman that was at one time a girlfriend of one of Bryce's brothers. She came up and ended up living on the property. She had a young boy who was 10. He's the same age as Jonathan. That boy, I'm not going to say their names because I am in touch with them and I haven't got their permission to say. The boy was B and his mom was a B, so we'll call him BB. The boy and Jonathan, my brother, became pretty good friends. His mom stayed in the barn in my memory and there was another woman, Caroline. I see her face clear as day. Interesting lady. All of these cultures blended together. There was others too. They had an effect on me and how I view the world, as well as growing up in my earlier years in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement, which there's a lot of stories in that era of my life as well. Time goes too fast when I do 15 minutes, so I might do another one right away because I have a train of thought. Maybe I'll post them both at the same time. Hopefully I've got a song that I wrote a few months ago sitting at this field. I had a chiropractor's appointment that I was early for and I came up to the field and walked around and some memories swirled in my head and swirled around. I sat in my truck and I wrote a song. I have a bunch of tunes, just music, that I have recorded over the years. I had one of my little recorders that had some of those tunes on it, so I was listening to them and I was inspired to write some lyrics. I haven't been comfortable playing it in public yet, but hopefully I can work it out before Saturday or Sunday and get it posted with this. Thanks for joining me again and I hope to see you next time. Life's the same in every place, with a little home run. Watching the crowds on a second base, and in love you won't be outdone. Your life's much more than these games you play, but not more than the songs that you sing. Walkin' back, what I'm tellin' you, shed light on your darker mind. Walkin' back, shine some light on it, the weight of your empty soul. I love your dance, the footwork designed to deceive. You juggle with all such footwork, and it's all that stuff you believe. In the middle of life and duplicity, let it shake and then color your greed. Let's lift up how you imagine it, put them under that altar of lies. Walkin' back, what I'm tellin' you, shed light on your darker mind. Walkin' back, shine some light on it, the weight of your empty soul. Walkin' back, I will love you, no matter how deep run your hate. Walkin' back, walkin' back, walkin' back. Walkin' back, do you think that I feel about you? Walkin' back, the way you feel about me. Walkin' back, the way that you feel about me. It's not the way that I feel about you. Walkin' back, don't you know that there's no limit to a good father's love. No, no, no, no. Oh, walkin' back, walkin' back, walkin' back, walkin' back. Walkin' back, walkin' back, walkin' back, walkin' back.