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 star of that region. My friend Nick & I were there, and "watched" him, though it was pitch black out. Based on our voices, some antelope charged us. Really. It was one of the strangest sensations--nearing percussion in the dirt with corresponding realization that something was about to strike us, though no way to see the animals. They turned away at the last second. Maybe they'd been scared out of sleep by John's chanting. One time, a scientist had cut down a tree in the high grove, only to later realize it had been the oldest living organism on the planet. He became a figure of public derision, and switched to the study of mushrooms, I think. Well...  it was a poem in Absentia... "Evidence Twenty." I used to believe the cycling back and forth of life--present to past... ping pong of perception and functional memory.... I guess it matters, the little project of a few hundred years to try and think in relation to mountains, trees, species--to see and feel and say. I guess there's something about a moment.

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