“Twilight is the crack between the two worlds. It is the door to the unknown…There is the door. Beyond there is an abyss and beyond that abyss is the unknown.”
The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castenada
Greenough Park was the twilight we slipped through as often as we could, guided by the little orange pill with the perfect name, Orange Sunshine. Others seemed to understand too what Greenough really was, because just as soon as the snow was gone, the Sixties finally made it to Missoula via a whole nation of Californians who were out on the road. They came to Greenough in beat up Volkswagen mini vans and old school buses covered in flower power stickers or wildly painted designs, their 8-track tape players and surround sound speakers blar- ing “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Ina Gadda Da Vida.” They came with dogs wearing railroad handkerchiefs around their necks that could catch Frisbees in mid-air. They came wearing bead- ed headbands, love beads, gypsy skirts, and sandals or just went barefoot, the guys usually shirtless or wearing leather vests with dirty patched up bell-bottoms. There was fringe, free love, and music everywhere and they were high on everything from God to crystal methadrine to LSD.
The whole scene disgusted Kenny, another invasion of white people who had screwed up their own country and were coming to take what was left of Montana. I secretly admired their carefreeness and lack of modesty and often fantasized about hopping into one of those wild vehicles and escaping Missoula, living on the road somewhere. Images from the Woodstock movie—tripping, skinny-dipping, dancing—drove my fantasy. What could be so wrong with a nation of peace and flower power? It seemed a lot better deal than trying to change the world the way my father believed it could be changed. Hadn’t he proved himself
wrong? I wanted to belong to these free spirits drifting across America, to something. To any- thing.
I didn’t tell Kenny what I was thinking but followed him silently as we slipped by the parked vans and the couples making out in the grass, and made our way first to the established trails and then off into the wild brush. He always walked with his head up, looking not to look into the faces of passersby, but above them. I walked that way too now, and saw things I had never seen before.
“Forget where we came from and see where we are,” he said to me once we found a quiet place to sit. His words flowed in a clipped singsong, a rhythmic dialect I was beginning to recognize as peculiar to the reservation. To me, it was another of his parables, drifting in
between leaves and time. They seemed to carry so much meaning, but when I tried to think about them harder, they’d always dissolve away.
I asked him once if his words had come from traditions passed on to him by family, a custom I had read about. But he never answered. Those lines had been cut by some dark thing he would never speak of. I imagined it had something to do with his father. He told me once that he had been a U S soldier and drunk himself to death. He never spoke of his mother.
Fascinated, I watched as his arm hairs strained erect like rows of delicate insect feelers probing the air. The tone of his skin shifted to red earth, his dark eyes floating in a liquid inner lid, and his raven hair more blue. Lines blurred between his form and the backdrop of trees. He became not Kenny in faded blue jeans and a sky-blue tie-dyed t-shirt but Kenny in camouflage. Not Kenny of flesh and blood, but particulate matter.
Then he seemed to forget me, leaving me sitting there with his body while his spirit soared through some other universe. Still, though we felt so far from civilization, it took a while for the reality of the urban roar to fade. Soon it was replaced with the subtext just below it—
owls screeching on the hunt, falcons screaming in the mountain updrafts, field mice rummaging for food, the steady roar of the creek rushing over boulders, the dead heat amplified by the persistent rustle of parched leaves and brittle needles, insects vibrating fragile wings, resonating like the papery skins of drums. I was vibrating too, merging, connecting with the hidden uni- verse moving under the carpet of pine needles. Fingers of air wrestled, bowing branches, tin- gling leaves like a symphony playing in a key just beyond earshot. Then the familiar sensation of porcelain skin brushing through satin, a rush of oxygen, lungs lifting skyward. Time forgot us both and left us drifting, our shadows marking the movement of the sun from day to night. Most moments were lost to the blur of time but there were lucid ones too. Near us, a decayed log was slowly being digested by large termites. Kenny took a package of red licorice out of his pocket, tore a stick into pieces and made a licorice trail alongside the log. They soon discovered it, their mighty bodies lifting the gargantuan pieces of candy and carting them off to their nest.
Another moment came when a large yellow swallowtail butterfly brushed past us, flut- tering erratically. Kenny held out his hand and it landed lightly on his finger, pressing its wings up and down. I had read the myth of a magical brave who could call the butterflies. I was beginning to believe the true illusion was the world I got out of bed in every morning.