Weird Tales

This story is the only one I have that happened in its entirety BEFORE I asked for louder signals. It's the one that bitch-slapped me out of my materialist stupor and opened up a whole new world of possibilities before me. So I think I'll tell it first.

Went something like this:

In 2008 I lost my "real job" when the U.S. economy hit the skids. I burned through my savings trying to reinsert myself into a specialized job market that didn't have a place for me anymore. (Naturally, I didn't go to college and acquire all that debt to be a bartender again.) Humbly, I lowered my tail, put our house on the market, and moved with my wife and newborn daughter into an empty one-bedroom bungalow owned by my mother-in-law...on the far side of the continent. It needed some work and I was happy to do it in exchange for free rent. Didn't have much choice really.

So in between picking English ivy out of the house's brick exterior - root by bloody root - and scrubbing cat urine off the living room walls, I started watching YouTube videos on self-reliance and homesteading, trying to figure out how to reduce our cost of living. And I stumbled across an interview with a man named David Holmgren from Australia, talking about this thing called permaculture. As an ecologist I considered myself a green type already, totally interested in "doing my part for the environment," but what David said to me that day crashed into my skull like a ton of bricks. All of them at once I'm afraid, due to the stubbornest English ivy known to man stitching them all together. Did I mention that I'm thick, and need louder signals than most?

It's not exaggerating to say that I experienced a full-on mental paradigm shift as a result of that interview. I was electrified. Every square foot of soil and rooftop become a medium for my new art. Just ask the next-door neighbor; he never could figure out why anyone would plant vegetables in the front yard. Or keep laying hens in town, for that matter. Or why we would go to the trouble to catch rainwater off the roof when there's perfectly good city water running from every tap. Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one who wasn't a big fan of my front-yard garden, and the other one mattered. My wife's mother did her best to be supportive of what I was doing, but when she informed us that she was going to move back into that one-bedroom bungalow - with us - to attend grad school nearby, we figured it was time to move along.

Skipping ahead a bit in the interest of space, my wife and I - now with two young children - spent the last of our money on a couple of forested acres back on the other side of the continent in the southern Appalachian Mountains. We were determined to have ownership of wherever we lived, and what that required just then, with our very limited budget, was a tent. In all fairness it was a very nice tent - a 16' x 20' canvas wall tent, bright and airy, 10' high at the gable. But a tent nonetheless.

We set it up on a big deck I built with a small porch extending out beyond the tent, all of it covered by a single rainfly. (Which sometimes even kept the rain out, at least early on.) But inside it was a dream tent: king-size bed for us, bunk-beds for the kids, wood stove, kitchen queen, claw-foot tub, couch, tables, bookshelf, we even had a little gas lighting by the end of the first winter; a mailbox with a registered address on it, a landline, and a propane stove, too. The guys from the phone company said it was the first telephone they'd ever installed in a tent. I've since heard that the county completely rewrote their building codes because of us...

By the first Fall school semester of life in that tent we were all ready for more interaction with other people, so I worked out a deal with the local Montessori school to design, install, and include their students in a permaculture program of my own creation in exchange for tuition for our two. We had quite the time for a few years - terraced garden beds on the south slope out back, fruit trees, chicken tractor made with salvaged bits of a derelict swingset, and an earth-berm greenhouse that I truly wished was mine...I taught weekly classes on organic gardening, herbalism, and permaculture, and took the students out to pick wild blackberries and made pie from scratch with them. (The blackberries, not the students - that's a different weird tale altogether.) Even managed to acquire some grant-funding for my program from a local electric cooperative. "Operation Self-Reliance" we called it.

But it was during my time at the school that we met and befriended a family who owned a large property (with two houses on it) out east of town. The husband and I became great friends, especially when things went south with his wife and they ended up divorcing. In the Spring of 2016 a local nursery was closing its doors after decades in business, and I offered to help him start an apple orchard on their property if he would buy the discounted trees and supplies and give me an interest in the future crop. My intention was to start a local cidery/meadery, with his fruit and financial backing. So he did, and I did, planting 100 apple trees of a couple dozen varieties that Spring.

Didn't take too long, though, to realize that living nearly half an hour away from the orchard wasn't working the way this permaculturalist wanted it to work. Zone 3 isn't supposed to be quite that far away from your doorstep...so we talked options and ended up moving our family out of our little hippie palace and into their other house in May of the same year. It was a dry year too. Keeping those baby trees watered out there in the blistering sun was a big reason we relocated; they couldn't go for more than a couple of days without water, and I got tired of the extra driving. But to be honest, it wasn't really that; I'd never felt so at home anywhere in my life, and I wanted to be there more. A lot more. And, after four years, maybe we were all ready for a shower...

Before long I talked my friend into installing an irrigation system to serve the growing orchard and gardens. We hired the track-hoe services of a local plumber friend to do the deep digging and install the water line with frost-free standpipes where we needed them. But in the process of digging the line the track-hoe got off-course, digging about 50' to the east of where we wanted to originally. But it is what it is - as far too many people say these days - and we just made it work, our plumber friend charging us for the design and not the "extra" product.

Now before I get to this last part I want to take a sec and let you know that, at that point in my life, and for the previous 20 years or so, I considered myself to be a proper atheist. I figured we live one life, that consciousness was a normal emergent property of any sufficiently complex life form, and that when we die that's it. No more Mr. Weirdtales. And I was OK with that.

But...

The day after the line was installed and back-filled, I was walking the spoil line collecting rocks and stomping down dirt clods so the mower could do its thing more safely. And that's when I saw it: the oddest little smooth dark brown stone, completely out of place among the grainy granite chunks and red clay clods, lying there among the spoil right at the corner where the digger corrected his course and made a bee-line for the garden to the west.

I stooped down and picked it up, and then BAM!! I was standing in the same spot, only now it was dark, watching a meteor streak down out of the sky and into the woods just to the south of me. In the vision I ran into the forest following the blazing white streak and found a small crater punched into the earth with a glowing red-hot meteorite sitting in the middle of it. I stood there and gawked at it for a few minutes waiting for it to cool off enough to touch it, then picked it up, dropped it into a small leather pouch hanging from my belt, and ran back to where I was. And there the vision ended.

It was a past-life memory. I lived right there in a previous life. I don't know if I lost the little meteorite in that life or was buried with it, but I found it again in a subsequent life. Against all odds. The long sequence of improbable events that led to my finding that little rock again - the size and shape of a large peach pit, smoothed by the incandescence of its descent through our atmosphere, with iron-rich red clay welded onto it from the heat of impact - is gob-smacking. But it happened.

And it changed me forever. Subsequent excavations (in my new orchard! I chose this very acre out of all of planet Earth to live and grow food AGAIN, whether I owned it or not!) unearthed an old outdoor cooking hearth, deep with charcoal, a few bones, and large burnt rocks surrounding it. I also found several large flattish stones nearby that were probably foundation supports for a cabin. A spring-fed creek ran by to the east about 150' away; the old home site was on a rise just above its floodplain. I have no idea whether I was Indian or white settler in the vision, but what I saw beyond my body was crystal clear.

The stories that follow this one are even weirder, and I'll get to them soon, but for now, I'm glad I finally got to tell this weird tale.

Thanks for listening,

Grover Walker