Solo

3 days on the side of a mountain

Three days on a mountain with no food only water

By Bill Poindexter

I have always liked the middle of the night; you know that time between 1am and first light. It is the time when night envelopes everything, when the owls and cats hunt. When the human wildlife prowls through the streets of the city, some up to no good others search for peace and stillness. Dew makes its way onto the grass; the hollows are cool with a heavy air. I like the night.?

I do not fear the night; I fear the dreams that come some nights.

When I travel by bike, I enjoy the time where I wake in the middle of the night, like now. I cannot help it, waking. I am wired that way, so was my dad. I wake to feel the night with all my senses; to embrace all it has to offer and let it take me where it wants me to go. I give in to the sirens calls.

I am on edge right now in between jobs, trying to figure out the next play in life.?

I can hear the train off in the distance, the traffic noise humming on the highway six miles away. I have always been fascinated with the way sound travels at night, it is like there is a temporal alternative reality at night.

Once I slept in the desert of New Mexico, just outside of Taos, I watched a thunderstorm dance across the vastness, with its lightning showing me the landscape. There were monsters, giants walking, no dancing toward me, the Pueblo gods, Coyote the Trickster perhaps. I awoke later as they passed my tent like smoke, if I tried to see or touch them, they would disappear.?

I see things at night I cannot explain. Shadows mostly. Shadows I can feel but only see out of the corners of my eyes. Are they real, and what are “they?” I wonder. Lost souls perhaps wondering on the ethereal plane of realities we can only fathom by delving deep in the mind with a meditation of sorts. That meditation can bring about visions of our altered reality.?

Long ago and far away I was on a 22-day mountaineering expedition deep on the Sierra Nevada mountains. I did a three-day vision quest, ate no food, had only water from the snow melt for nourishment. I stayed on a small rock ledge for the three days, and there was just enough room for my tarp, sleeping pad and bag, and journal with my pencil. The ledge was only about 7 feet high, and nestled in the spaces in the granite platform I was on lived a marmot, who would sit next to me watching my intrusion with an innocent curiosity. And he would make sounds that only a marmot could make, I wondered what he was saying to me.

I had no watch, no GPS, nor phone. It was a time when one traveled with a map and compass and primitive instinct.

On that solo, I had deep experiences, mostly when I awoke in the night, that 1am to first light time, when the comfort of the Milky Way Galaxy showed me time and space and new realities as well as showing me reels of my life until that point in time. Vivid images showed me my darkest paths, as though to awaken a part of my life I suppressed for whatever reason, and the tears came in torrents as I stood on that ledge, in the night, arms stretched to the sky, gravity seemed to release its hold as the Earth and stars became me, and I them. There was no fear, it was a time of penance. Then the past became the present and that was all that mattered. That present awareness was reality. I collapsed, purged of my transgressions, into a deep sleep. During the days I would write about what happened and that helps with clarity. I wrote with a pencil.

People now use drugs to go to the places I went on that three-day journey. LSD, shrooms, peyote, ayahuasca, and I am sure others, but those are not needed. The clarity and open vulnerability which come from better and a rawer natural experience.

Nature, for lack of a better word, and I became one.

I will never be able to explain what happened fully. Maybe my friend the Marmot could have told you what happened? But that was long ago, 33 years, I can still feel it with all my senses, and I have never had the courage to go back.

Until now.

Author's note: I would like to thank the kind marmot, who inadvertently became my guide on that Solo vision quest.

I appreciate him sharing his home with me for that short time. The universe is indeed kind.