The gospel according to Sally 

(Author's note: On occasion, family history can simply mean getting lost with someone you never really knew.)

As always, unapologetically unedited.

IT COULDN’T BE too much farther. Or at least it seemed so as I watched the fog settle in along the coastal hills. The fog rolled across the highway and up into the crevice divides of an unapparent side road ebbing back and forth a bit, gathering and receding along the path of the road itself. The road was barely more than gravel, albeit still a path, it wasn’t much more than a collection of muddy ruts. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said this blind travel was only going to lead us further into the darker depths of some hobbit’s lair. I really didn’t know where we were. In truth, I had only the vaguest clue of where we might be going.

In the silent drone of the morning fog, I could hear myself answer her.

"Really, Sally? We’re going to “a pine hut” in the woods? Who does that?"

Shouldn’t we be getting back?

As I said this, she seemed to look off into some unforeseen distance. For me, it was just more a matter of how could anyone find anything” out here. I mean it was “pretty” and all that…but… Exactly why is there some random “Pine Hut” out here in the fogs of Mordor? I guess she’d been there (perhaps) more than once before - here to this “pine hut,” and into these “baked woods” with some random lover from her before. Looking back now, I’m not sure if she ever really said.

                     

Yet she seemed to remember it all exactly. She knew at which muddy rut we needed to turn; her eye constantly scoped out the pristine rot of the fence posts that lingered up and down the hillsides. She did this all the while looking for just that ‘correct one’ which would mark our arrival. "Just a little further," I can still hear her telling me. This, along with the snoring putter of the VW’s motor chugging its way through the mud and the foggy thoughts surrounding us (along with a few fence posts) was all there was to guide us anywhere.

I have to admit - that damp air did seem to hold a bit of adventure. And while I wasn’t too keen about leaving my car parked along some adjacent footpath of a Monterrey County highway there wouldn’t be many other options. Can’t we just go back to school? She looked at me like one would a lost waif who just might never understand - all while reassuring me that everything was going to be just fine.

So I drove in and off the road anyway, and parked 'off offsides' to one of those rumbling gulley ruts fresh outta Mordor that she kept pointing to. At long last, the VW sputtered to a stop taking refuge under a trifecta of mud, fog, and wide-mouth pines. The pines swayed like sirens; sirens whose voice was to invite me further into the fog and into what was to be this latest (if not for me the last) incarnation of the gospel according to Sally.

It was to be (no doubt) our last truly great adventure. Indeed, we stopped the VW at that one particular fence post she’d been looking for. The wires connecting to its boundaries had long ago succumbed to poignant rust, and gave us no trouble in moving through and on past. 

Stepping over that wiry ilk, the woods became thicker and the fog conspired with sunlight to guide and hide us along the path. The mud itself began to fade into a pebbled loam filled with bits of pine needles, and this, along with their mother cones, converged into an ancient sandy floor. 

                        

The ground became drier as the elevation sent us slipping downward, even as we appeared to move deeper into the shade of the forest. I could smell salt in the air and in the tiniest of distances I could hear the slamming of the he ocean telling me that wherever we were going, Pine Hut or not, we couldn’t be too far away.

“I ain’t tellin’ no lie

Mine’s a tale that can’t be told

My freedom I hold dear

How years ago in days of old

When magic filled the air

‘T was in the darkest depths of Mordor

I met a girl so fair…”

I watched her pick up her dress as she moved against the mud and through the woods. It seemed so damn silly to me now. This dress of hers and the mud. Yet she was so well-assured and sure-footed in seeking our destination - a veritable Athena. It was just so fucking incongruous that her skirts were long that day. I mean was she trying to make a statement as we traipsed through that muddy entry and towards this sandy retreat of hers? How delicate ‘an action’ it seems now, indeed how very sensual. How she lifted her skirts as she moved across those barriers and the bob-wire fence. Who was this girl? How impractical and unnecessary too, for her to stop and pick a wildflower for her hair amidst the muddy green reeds to compliment her tresses and clothes. And me, her not-so-humble patron stumbling along slightly stoned and behind her simply trying to keep up.

You do know I have a major mid-term next week, right?

As the clearing in the path came into view - I saw it. You know, I saw that “Pine Hut” that she had implored us to seek out. And yes, it was holy magnificent! I should correct myself here to tell you that there truly was no clearing at all, or rather that the clearing itself was a sheltered one. You see in the center of it all was of course “the” Pine Hut - but stretching over and above it (and indeed over all of the clearing) was a great canopy of primitive firs. The ancient canopy covered the hut so well and so deeply that light from the sky barely shone through.

The hut itself was somewhat round, and in many ways, I suppose you could say that it was built like a yurt. While its geometry was roundish, whoever had built it had taken freedom in creating extensions with its form. A yawn in its needlework led from one entry to another on its opposite sides. And yes, from earth to sky, the hut was made of absolutely nothing but pine needles, with pine branches interwoven together upward to form the shape of a dome. Its roof line was low; its open center no higher than say about five of six feet. In its apex was a hole, a good-sized aperture to allow smoke to escape from the small campfire placed in the center of the Pine Hut’s floor below it. The place appeared to have been there for literally years.

How the f’ did this get here? Had aliens built it?

Nope, just hippies.

House Hunters International - “The Hippy AirBnB” tonight at 6.pm on a channel near you.

It was incredible.

Not to be outdone was the smell and roar of the ocean nearby, and indeed with just another brief walk down the trail an expanse of beach opened up that led to high and stoic rock formations leading out into the Pacific. Here the mists that had brought us here still flowed outward, and serene trees watched from bluffs overhead. It was nothing short of stunning.

                      

There was not another soul in sight.

And yes, if you must know we’d brought some of that silly old lysergic acid diethylamide with us on the trip that day. I have no good excuse for this, other than to say that we were very young and that this is what adventurous young people sometimes were wont to do “back in the day.” So yes, we retired to the dome, into the yurt if you will, and into “that Pine Hut of a place” to experience that drug, and each other in ways that now seem like only a dream from some other life in some other long ago place.

It was an incarnation. It was Sally’s gospel. And it was fucking beautiful.

I don’t remember when it all ended, or how it was that we returned to our more normal lives. As it was I think we absconded into a nearby campground before dawn to shower and make our way back home to dorm life.  I remember as we drove home that day and as the VW sputtered along the alameda I realized it had all felt like a dream. You see as I drove that highway and the VW sputtered, and it along with our thoughts pulled up alongside a brand-new Cadillac. I heard Sally ‘scoff’ into the gospel as she told it. I heard her disdain for such a material thing and for that Cadillac’s world as she assumed it to be.

It was then that, well, I kinda knew the dream was over.

You see I liked shiny things? I wanted that Cadillac.

It just wasn’t gonna work.

II.

I didn’t know who she was but she seemed to be everywhere. I will admit, though that I was pretty clueless. I’d just come through a lot of that bullshit with “the son of an aging child film star,” so I was keeping my head down and a pretty low profile. (Not to mention that I was pretty fucked up in the head anyway.)

All I could think was: Who the fuck can you truly trust around this place anyway? I had just come into the quad complex to eat dinner after all. Whatever you’re offering I don’t need your weird stalker drama. I’m just here to hang out with Steve or Ken or see what Dan is up to. For the most part, I tried not to see or notice this very pretty young lady looking at me.

At least not a first.

But she was frickin’ everywhere. She was certainly there every time I left the dorm and everytime I went in to eat. I’d seen her on the floors and in the dorms hallways a couple of times too. Why are you looking at me chick? was all I could think. Still, she was and still, she did. There was no doubt she was very, very pretty. She had a faraway look in her eyes like some fairy princess locked in a tower. Hell, she even looked like a fairy princess who might have been locked away in a tower.

I must admit, she was way too much the hippy flower child for me - not that I didn’t often feign the hippy flower child myself. It was just that I preferred (and was way more attracted to) a more “conventional” type, you know, like the “girl next door.” I certainly preferred one less “earthy” and less “patchouli oiled up” and maybe I liked a bit of a more bitchy sort of woman a whole lot better. After all, I like shiny things. I wasn’t really into the "peace, love, and Haight Ashbury” sort of looks. I mean it was nice and all that…but…

Still, there she was. Why didn’t she just go away?

I think it must have been Steve who said to me one day at, “You know that girl really likes you. Dude, she’s beautiful.” Oh yeah, I guess she does was all I could think back.

So soon enough I meandered over to Sally there among the cafeteria trays and beef tongue and cole slaw for dinner and somehow struck up a conversation with her. I’m not sure that any of it felt natural - I mean I think Steve and Ken were watching to make sure I didn’t fuck it up and not score with this very pretty maiden. Yet after a bit, I guess even I fell victim to her charms. She was after all an alluring woman and I was a very stoned young man. What the heck was all my twenty-year-old self could think.

“See the menfolk standin’ in line

I said they come to pray to the Lord

With my little girl, looks so fine

In the evening when the sun is sinkin’ low

Everybody’s with the one they love

I walk the town, keep a-searchin’ all around

Lookin’ for my street corner girl”

The days went on and she and I become a couple. I did enjoy her soft “come hither” voice and her “I could care less what anyone thinks of me” attitude. And while I didn’t always relate well to it, "We must save the world” seemed to be her mantra. 

There was a lost child quality about her too, like someone who had been forced to take refuge in an ideal fantasy world at a young age to escape some terrible hardship or pain. The trouble for me was that I wasn’t sure I shared those same values. While saving the planet was a great idea I also wanted to live in it too. Too much fantasy earth-saving and social justice championing just didn’t work for me. It just felt impractical.

I did like the looks we'd get when we’d go places and there’d be a lot of jocks or stuck-up upperclassmen. (The university had a good mess of those.) I remember sitting on the banks of the Lexington Reservoir for some major college kegger blowout. Here the jocks got drunk while Sally and I wove flowers into each other’s hair.

God those dumbass jocks hated us for even being there. I think that’s when I loved Sally most - when we didn’t care about what the rest of the world was thinking.

But it just didn’t work.

III.

I could hear the band warming up. The Holy Ghost of my friend Dan had insisted that we come up into the Santa Cruz mountains not too far from Lexington Reservoir to enjoy a music venue he’d put together. I’d borrowed a huge RV, driving it down from Sacramento. I wanted to make sure that I and my new lady friend were comfortable and a good place “to camp” while we listened to the music. It’d been several years now since we’d all graduated from college and left our time there behind. I wanted to play the big shot with the RV - though I sure as hell wasn’t. 

I liked this new lady a lot. I liked being with her. She was normal. How she tolerated some of my past I will never know. I parked the RV and we got out and began to enjoy the music. admit. Old Dan had done a Hell of a job in putting it all together.

It was good to see everyone again and to catch up a bit. As we poured another beer and fired up another doob, I saw her again, Sally, coming out of the forest and the brush like some native princess or wood nymph. Her long skirts flowed incongruously once again.

 She drifted toward us, ever dreamy, ever alluring, and asked if I would step aside with her for a private conversation.

What a mistake.

She didn’t like my girlfriend. What are you doing with her? She’s totally wrong for you!

It didn’t go well.

When I returned, my new lady asked: How could I just walk off and leave her in the company of Dan "The Holy Ghost" and a bunch of strangers -AND to go off with some other woman?

Yeah, that didn’t go well either.

But I made my choice. Nancy and I went home. And forty-five years later, she is still my choice.

IV.

It’s kind of funny looking back. There was so much beauty to it all. I mean, who gets to drop acid in a Pine Hut on the beaches of Mordor with a fair hippy maiden? Who gets a beautiful woman to weave flowers in your hair while you both get to basically tell a bunch of drunk college jocks to fuck off? Hey, for me those memories are frickin priceless. I don’t believe I would ever want to trade those experiences for much of anything. 

I hope that when senility overtakes me and my mind doesn’t know where it is, or where it's going, that it might find its way back to that muddy path through the hills and that I will once again sit around the fire in that Pine Hut. After all, I’d never dropped acid on the beaches of Mordor before.

“Will you meet me in the middle?

Will you meet me in the air?

Will you love me just a little?

Just enough to show you care?

Well, I tried to fake it

I don’t mind sayin’, I just can’t make it”

                  

         As they say, though, you can’t go back. I’ve already written about the tragedy that came to Sally at a young age - her mother, the young opera singer's murder - so there’s no reason to go into that again here. I've also attested as to what a remarkable life Sally has gone on to lead - sailing the Pacific with her husband and son and writing a book to tell of her adventures. Yes, Sally, and her championing of environmental causes. Well done old friend, well done. I just felt that as I grow old and recollect my days gone by that it wouldn’t be right not to remember her and our times a bit, and to surely tell the tale of the Pine Hut.

                        

                                     

It was, after all, simply the gospel according to Sally.

It just wasn’t my book.

END