John B. Free
I knew this guy who left his family, moved to the town of Baker, Nevada, which is a town of 100 people, right at the entryway to Great Basin National Park, on the Utah / Nevada border, where there's a glacier and an amazing grove of Bristlecone Pines up at elevation. But it's high desert. No one lives out there. There's not even the ranch-glamor of Montana country. I think now they're loners, the population of Baker--that the great open space dwarfs them in a way that feels accurate-- though I know they did have friendships, community, purpose. Anyway, he moved there to a little cottage along a runoff creek and became a Wiccan priest, a Warlock, and changed his name to John B. Free. I don't know what his name had been before. He didn't say much about his previous life. It wasn't right. He did a ceremonial kind of tai chi around witch's rock, a big boulder in a meadow a few thousand feet below Wheeler Peak, which is kind of the geological st