This Killing Winter: Part Four

[Continued from previous post.]

What followed next was a series of shocks.

Towards the end of March, I found three messages on my phone one night, just before going to bed – one from my nephew, one from my sister, and one from my mother. They all said the same thing: my house had been broken into and ransacked. Thieves had smashed through the glass of the back door and stolen everything they thought worth carrying away. My nephew, who’d discovered the break-in, even had video of the wreckage. Superstitious as it may have been, I thought of the fae – or whoever these elemental critters were I’d been trying to talk to. Hadn’t they been guarding the house? (This was what the psychic had specifically told me, unbidden.) Hadn’t they, or someone, been sending me these significant “dreams” – messages which, albeit, had only seemed to bode of invasion, in one form or another. Had I somehow pissed them off? Because they did seem, after all, a bit touchy… After more than twenty years without a burglary in my very safe neighborhood, it was as if they’d painted a big target on the place, out of spite. 

Were they angry that I’d not come home to them when they’d called? Was that it? 

Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Pete’s apartment where I now was living was as thick as ever. His ex-wife was often over, and I was thankful for that. When she came, the two of them made their own world together and I felt that I could get on with my own. I kept to my books, I put my headphones on, I wrote in my journal, I went to the gym. In short, I dug in and tried to wait this whole thing out. Whatever may happen, the season would not last for much longer. About a week after the news of the break-in, I was in a wreck on my way to work. It all happened so very fast, but with utter clarity. I saw brake lights flash on the cars and trucks ahead of me as they all started fishtailing wildly. I tried to slow also and started drifting out of control. I saw I was heading for the concrete siding of the bridge and there was nothing I could do to stop or avoid it. When I hit, my Jeep spun violently around on the shoulder until it eventually stopped. I was giddy with the shock. My hands shook as I fumbled for my phone, not at all clear on who I was supposed to call. So many times I’d driven this mountain grade, oftentimes in white-out conditions, often with a white-knuckle grip on the wheel but never with any real problem, and now in the clear and relative warmth of early spring… The same thing had happened to a forest ranger ahead of me, and though she’d spun out up the hill a bit, beyond the bridge’s railings, she’d almost gone down an embankment and into a river, stopping just at the edge of the precipice. We got out and looked across the distance at each other as the rest of the gathering traffic rushed past. Neither of us was hurt, but my car would need repairs to be drivable again, and I was starting to feel like I might be cursed. Paying heed to my dreams, and following the indicated, significant paths as had opened – at least so far as I could see – everything was going entirely wrong. 

Tensions at home were only getting worse. Pete wasn’t talking to me, and frankly, I didn’t want him to. I just wanted to find some space to myself. His wife complained to me that he’d become so needy, she couldn’t take any more of him. She’d wanted to remain his friend, but this sort of smothering need was what had driven her off in the first place. Since we all three worked in the same place, there was a sense of community, but also a lot of talk and few secrets. My colleagues often asked me what was going on, and I felt like the worst sort of gossip if I told them any of it, but damned to a personal hell if I couldn’t say anything. I tried to be judicious in what I did say, but I couldn’t keep my anxiety to myself.

I came home to Pete – always there, as ever, the blaring television as well, always on – arguing over the telephone with someone. I knew it could only be her, his wife. I felt badly for her, but I’d stopped feeling sorry for Pete. If he could simply let go of all this, he’d be fine and so would everyone else. Desperate and depressed as he may be, he was making his problems for himself. After hanging up, he curled up on the couch and fell fast asleep, though it was barely seven in the evening yet. His telephone rang and rang, but he would not respond. 

At work the next day his wife told me she’d been asking around the kitchen for my phone number that evening before; she’d wanted me to check on Pete and see if he was okay. I gave it to her then, a little late to do much good, but told her to call me any time. And when I got home again, Pete, wired on energy drinks, started grilling me the moment I walked through the door: “Did my wife ask for your number? Why would she do that? Did she say she was worried about me? I don’t want her to talk to other people about me. It’s embarrassing, it’s humiliating…” I was starting to feel genuinely frightened, both for his wife and myself. I resented his intrusive questions, and he’d crossed a line. Pete could go to hell for all I cared – I needed to take care of myself.

With less than a week left on the schedule, I had a day off. This was a Tuesday. Out running errands in the morning, I thought to go back home for a rest, but as I drove up to the turn-off, I saw an image of the apartment in my mind’s eye – of my room, of those four walls and the furniture inside them – and neutral as it may have been in itself, the feeling-tone was so oppressive and intolerable, this was the last place I wanted to be. It was vivid and intense. A shudder went through me like some kind of allergic reaction, and I knew I had to avoid home at all costs. I ran more errands, I went to a movie, I walked around the grounds of a shopping mall just to kill the time. In the evening I went to a company party at my boss’s house. He, aware of my situation, offered me a spare room to stay in, if I needed it. He also told me that my last two days on the schedule they could manage without me, if I had to get out of town. I told him I would take him up on both accounts. Pete’s wife had left me a frantic message, which I’d gotten only after the movie. Something was wrong, she said, the police had gone to the apartment and couldn’t find him. The details were murky, but clearly things had escalated again. She’d left no number – my phone had been turned off at the time – and I couldn’t return her call. But I would need to go back that place, if only to pack my things and get out again.

And I had to admit I felt a detached, maybe sick, curiosity – I needed to find out what had happened.

[To be continued.]

This Killing Winter: Part Three

[Continued from previous post.]

The next day was miserable. My home was open to any random asshole the company assigned me, and though this was normal enough and, I supposed, my lot as a low-paid kitchen worker in need of cheap, temporary housing, I also knew it wasn’t something I could live with. Whoever this new roommate was, it was clear he had no idea what basic consideration of others amounted to. I was ready to walk off the job, if this was what I had to look forward to. 

I thought often and puzzled over these two “dreams” that I’d had, and what they might indicate. I’d entertained any number of theories, one being that something – these elemental spirits? – had been trying to protect my sovereign space. It seemed childish, perhaps; especially now in light of the fact that my home was anything but protected. Maybe these were warnings, delivered in a neutral tone: they were showing me what would happen, and that was as much intervention as they could or cared to manage. But whatever the motivation, I couldn’t help but feel that something was communicating with me, something outside of myself, delivering messages of import. 

This was in February, but let me back up a little. 

At Christmas time, the resort’s kitchen was shocked by the rumors that Pete, the sous chef of daytime operations, had attempted suicide. This was one of many factors that left many of us thinking that this was turning out to be a particularly hard winter. I’d already had one friend back in Seattle – another cook (an executive chef, in fact) – die suddenly for unknown reasons. The news about Pete travelled fast through the kitchen, and people had a hard time accepting it. I’d known Pete since my first season at the resort, and had at first been able to talk with him, though as the seasons rolled past, he became more and more distant, and we interacted less – finally, hardly at all. The suicide attempt had been unsuccessful, but it was serious. This was no mere cry for attention. What seemed in some ways even more shocking was that within a couple of weeks, Pete was back at work, carrying on as if nothing had happened, and if one could tell from his demeanor, expecting others to do the same. Unable to simply ask him about it, the rest of us were baffled. Had the rumors been exaggerated? Finally, I figured, what else was he supposed to do? He needed to work, right? Things carried on, though I often wondered if there was something that I could or should do to reach out to him, as if I had some responsibility. We’d sort of, at least some time ago, been friends. One day, meeting up with him on the loading dock where people went to smoke, I asked him about martial arts, something I knew he’d taught once and was passionate about. We made tentative arrangements for me to take instruction with him; it was something I’d often, in earlier times, thought about doing anyhow. He seemed genuinely interested. 

When, a week later, I was in my throes over my housing situation and complained to a friend that I was ready to quit because of it, Pete was in earshot and asked me if I’d like to move in with him. He worked year-round at the resort and had his own apartment, not far from where I’d been living. Since his wife had recently left him, and her eldest son moved out as well, he had a spare bedroom and would charge the same rent as what I now paid – way below fair share of the apartment’s cost. He just wanted somebody around, he said. Although I knew this was an unstable environment, I couldn’t help but feel that I was being led toward something. This might allow me to keep with my job, and maybe I could provide some modicum of support to someone who really needed it. I’m no crisis counsellor – I had no illusions about that – but if Pete just needed someone friendly around, I could at least, or so I thought, manage that. 

Pete was a burly guy, covered with Japanese-influenced tattoos, and as a former professional cage-fighter, no doubt something of a badass, but underneath that a basically gentle soul in a great deal of pain. Moving into his apartment, I didn’t know what to expect at first, but it seemed, on the surface, a great improvement. He could at the very least respect the fact that another person lived under the same roof. We were, in the beginning, able to compare our strange experiences: he was, for instance, a witness to the Phoenix lights of 1997, and this was something I never would have guessed. He’d had many other encounters as well, and we could swap stories about things of this nature: UFOs, the shamanic, the paranormal. It seemed he was an old hand, and had, like me, long felt something calling him that marked him and left him feeling slightly outside the scope of mainstream human affairs. 

But the severity of his depression was hardly a thing of the past and over with. He drank heavily, nearly constantly, sometimes on the job, and when at home, he seldom left the couch. Since the sofa was right beside my bedroom door, night after night of his passing out in front of the tv began to make me a little squirrelly; he was always just right there. What’s more, his over-large personality seemed to take up all the air in the room, whether I had my door shut or not. Living at the apartment, I began to feel like a piece of set-dressing, another prop or background actor in someone else’s movie. This was a familiar feeling to me, something I’m entirely too sensitive to perhaps, and one of the reasons I value solitude so highly. 

Also, I worried about the real likelihood of coming home to a dead body. 

In time, I found navigating around the atmosphere of the apartment to be more exhausting than working on my feet all day. For what little he told me about what was going on with him, it was clear there was a great deal more that he wasn’t saying. If I was there to be of any support, it wasn’t working, and I could only resent the pressure that I felt I was under. Still, the sense that I’d been navigated into this position by something beyond myself persisted. It seemed even unavoidable; the events that had brought me here were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, all fitting too neatly together. There was a sense that I had a job I needed to do; I just couldn’t see what that job was, or that I was doing it. But the winter ski season is, thankfully, a finite thing, and its close in mid-April was drawing nearer. I had only to hang on for a few weeks more, and then move on back to Washington, but I had no idea how difficult that would prove to be.

[To be continued.]

This Killing Winter: Part Two

[Continued from the previous post.]

The transient housing for employees at the ski resort where I work each winter is, at its best, occasionally adequate. Moldy dorm rooms with two or three to a person house most in town, while some ways out of Park City, a fishing camp at the base of the reservoir dam, complete with little two-room cottages, affords at least the possibility of a room to oneself in which to take refuge. This is where I have stayed. My first cabin mate of this latest winter season was a considerate, if usually drunken man about my same age named Don. Things with him were going well enough until he drank himself into a tequila rage one night, then was inexplicably gone the next day, his room cleared out, himself no longer employed at the resort. But some one or two weeks before this happened, I woke up from a dream that did not seem to be a dream at all, yet in retrospect it seemed predictive.

In this “dream” I’d only just started to drop off into sleep, just past that twilight state in which things and voices and entire scenes may intrude as prelude to sleep and proper dream. While hovering in this state I heard a shout – it seemed to be Don’s voice – and this rattled me back awake, unsure if I’d really heard or not heard it. There was no further sound to follow this, but I realized in short order that I smelled a heady scent of shit; my entire room smelled of the stuff, and it was revolting. It didn’t seem to be coming from me, so far as I could tell, but it seemed inescapable. I tried to simply lay there for a short while, hoping to get back to sleep despite this, but in time, realized that I would at least need to go to the bathroom myself if I was to relax at all again. And as soon as I picked my head up off the pillow, the reek was gone. It had entirely dissipated in that instant, as though it had never been there. There was suddenly no more trace of it at all.

This perplexed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole thing that next morning: an agonized shout, the smell of dung. Although it could be explained away, no doubt, any number of ways, I had the troubling sense that something had been trying to send me a message. At work in the bakery that morning, I mentioned it to my coworker, a very feet-on-the-ground type of woman, one I truly liked, though one not willing to entertain much of this etheric sort of thing, who said, “Maybe it’s your faeries talking.” There was at least a hint of mocking in her tone. But still it got me to thinking.

Within two weeks of this, Don had drunk himself into a blind rage and then he was gone, like a ghost. Something of his own dark side had caught up with him. I’d had to endure a night of his agonized shouts and him pounding against the walls (while not exactly willing, myself, to confront a tequila-fueled monster ape who was clearly suffering, and ask him to stop). I later thought often of the dream, or hallucination, or whatever it was. Perhaps it was that Don had only shouted in his sleep, agonized by some nightmare. But there was also the suffocating smell of shit in the air, gone the moment I’d moved at all… and that was peculiar, and it seemed to signify something. I felt that the whole thing, whether I was reaching or not, could be read symbolically, just like a dream, whether it had been mine or my roommate’s, or not a dream at all. Don had choked on his own crap.

The next “dream” came a couple of weeks after this had happened. With Don now out of the picture, but the resort still hiring (and therefore housing) people beyond its capacity, I knew it was only a matter of time before the next roommate moved in. I was told to expect one shortly by the housing manager. I only hoped this guy might be as agreeable as the last. Yet as the days past, and then became some weeks, I spent spent the time in the cabin to myself and loving it. I am, after all, a very private person. I like the quiet. I thrive on solitude, yet I knew it couldn’t last. One particular night – or rather, one early morning – I was awoken by the sound of people, two or three of them, suddenly throwing open the door to the cabin and tromping loudly in. They chatted amongst themselves as if it were mid-day and there was no one else about, certainly no one trying to sleep in the dark and small hours in the occupied room. One of them seemed to express some annoyance at the signs of someone already living in the place – that would be me – and the whole group in time trotted back outside into the snow, leaving the front door wide open, as if they were in the midst of moving in. Are these my new roommates? I thought, and, What complete assholes! My heart was racing. I was furious. What’s more, they’d left the front door open, and the heat was escaping. I could already feel the temperature start to drop.

So I got up out of bed to at least shut the door, and when I stepped out from my bedroom into the darkened kitchen, found the front door already well-shut. There was nobody there, and as far as I could tell, there had never been anybody there. But here was another intrusive “dream”, from somewhere outside the cusp of normal sleep. This had felt nothing like the sort of dream I might normally wake from, shake off, and realize had been just that. This was something altogether different. This was all but physical, and as it turned out, altogether predictive as well.

It was maybe two weeks later that somebody did finally show up, and this in the middle of the night, just like I’d “dreamed” it. I woke up around one a.m. to the sound of somebody opening the front door, walking through the kitchen, closing themselves up in the empty, bare room and flushing the toilet. It was clear that there was somebody actually there. I had no idea who. Anxiously, in time, I was able to get back to sleep, until in the morning the sound of them now leaving woke me up once more. I stretched and looked out through the slats of my window’s blinds to see a pair of feet walking heavily off through the snow. Okay, I thought, that was just odd. And disturbing. I learned the next day, when the housing manager again came by, that this was in fact my new roommate. Great. I groaned inwardly, but knew that it had been coming. I heard or saw nothing more of this mystery person for several more nights until again, in the middle of the night, I woke up from the sound of the door thrown open, and all the lights were turned on, and two pairs of feet walked heavily back and forth through the kitchen. Voices talked – at full volume – and something was set down into the empty room. A box? The two left again, only to return again, repeat the noisy intrusion, leave again, return again, then leave. It was like a Chinese water torture. My blood was boiling.

I again remembered my “dream”. It had been exactly this.

[To be continued.]

This Killing Winter, Part One

I don’t know if I should be writing about this. There is more than one reason for my hesitation. The events of the last few months in my life are relevant to the topic of this blog, but they are so tangled up in personal minutiae that it may be too hard to unravel clearly, and the whole thing ends badly, if it can be said to end at all. It’ll take a few postings to work it out, but I guess I’ve got time now. The work of the winter season is over with, and I’m home again in Washington. There’s a certain amount of chaos at my house that I need to sort out – some thieves broke in and stole what they wanted while I was away – but at least the pressure is off me now, so far as I can tell. Now it’s time to rest for a moment and recover, and try and sort a few very difficult things out.

I guess it begins with the psychic Anya Briggs. Not that anything that’s happened is her fault; she just got me to thinking in certain ways. In particular, she got me to thinking about the elemental spirits that seem to be living around my home, and urged me, during a Skype session with her in the summer of 2012, to open a dialog with these critters, as there seemed to be one clamoring for my attention, making our own conversation difficult. I was game for it, and so began conversing with the faeries, not exactly believing nor disbelieving, since I couldn’t see them – at least, not directly – but willing to try, and to watch all the while for what might come of it. [For further details, see Faery Talk posting] The results were imaginative and playful, and opened me up to an imaginal realm of possibility; one not quite new entirely, but now differently and interestingly nuanced – peopled with new invisibles that may be my own creation, that may be objectively real, or that may be both or neither or all of the above and more. That there was a hint of darkness to this dialog surprised me, but it seemed not unreasonable that talk with an elemental spirit may carry with it also a measure of violence. Certainly not everything in the imaginal kingdom was light and ease and rainbows. In short, the fae seemed a bit capricious and difficult, if not outright vindictive sometimes. They had personality.

This is important.

For the remains of the summer and into that autumn, I continued to blunder through my conversations with the fae, and I couldn’t say what exactly it amounted to, but it seemed fun. I saw small things moving in the corners of my eyes, in fact almost all of the time, particularly in early evening, in the twilight hour. In my meditations, I tried to listen and to speak. There often seemed something fluttery and soft at the back of my mind, though I could never discount that I might be imagining it. But that wasn’t what mattered. The literalness of the thing was of no consequence. What I was addressing rendered the question of “real” or “unreal” at least a little bit irrelevant. The imaginal is what it is.

Soon enough, December grew close and it was time for me to leave for Utah, where I work in the winter and have for a while. If the faeries were tied to the land in Washington, then I would be leaving them; if they weren’t, they were welcome to come with me and continue the conversation. It seemed as if a little of both might be the case.

This is all to set the stage.

After the winter season was over, I’d planned a trip to New York City to visit some friends, and so set up a session in person with Anya, whom I’d never met face-to-face, except through Skype. In our session, she remarked about my sleep. I’ve long had troubles sleeping, but she told me that once I’d gotten back home again, back to the island, I’d sleep like a little baby. The sleep of the innocent. And it was true: in the two weeks I’d been back in Washington before coming to New York, I’d never slept better, except maybe for one night in Geneva, when traveling through Europe. This, she said, was because of these elementals, because I’d taken the trouble to acknowledge them. For this effort, they were helping me, and they were also helping to protect my home. I took this with my usual stance of both openness and skepticism, accepting while neither believing nor not, though I found this last assertion at least a bit surprising.

There was a lot more to the session, but I won’t go into that here. I flew back to Washington and settled into the summer. I worked a bit more in Utah, returned to Whidbey in the autumn, then left again for another Park City winter. It amounted to a lot of driving. Just before leaving this last time, I replaced my ailing Saturn with a used Jeep. When I left, it was with a sense of anxious foreboding. I put it down to the new car, not knowing what sort of problems it might have. As it turned out, there was a lot more to it than that. As it turned out, it may very well be that the fae are partial to their location. As it turned out, they may very well have been righteously pissed that I was leaving, again.

[To be continued.]

I-Bar Christmas-light Coat-hanger Thing in the City Night Sky (1986)

It was some weeks ago that I remembered this event. I wouldn't call it buried, but for some reason I’d simply forgotten about it until then. After working for a while with my writing group, the few of us walked from our regular coffee shop on the pier to the local tavern up the street (I had coffee; the others by now preferred wine), and we got to talking about local author Tom Robbins, who was hugely popular when I was in college in the 1980’s. I remarked that I’d seen him speak once at the UW, back in the day. Soon after telling the others the bare facts about this, and that he was an engaging speaker, there was something that nagged at me, though, and I knew there was more to the story. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Yes, I’d gone to see the author. A friend and I drove up from Olympia for the event, to see him at the University’s Kane Hall, a mammoth auditorium where I’d once taken a 101 Psychology course with 700 other freshmen before transferring to another school. The lecture hall was even more crowded on this occasion, and I remembered that Robbins, the author of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, “Jitterbug Perfume”, et al, was funny and entertaining, and seemed to know how to work the audience. But I knew there was something more to it, and I was sure there was a UFO connection. It bothered me, because this idea seemed tacked onto my recollection of the event, like a flag or a post-it note. It felt artificial, like I was reaching for something not there.

It wasn’t until the next morning that the rest of it came back to me. I was surprised that I’d not remembered it sooner, because it was something I’d been aware of for all of my life since the day it happened. It wasn’t a buried memory or traumatic, just weird. This would have been sometime in 1986, and my friend Birdy and I drove the 70 miles north on I-5 in my dilapidated Impala for the event. It was just as we entered the city, reaching downtown, with the financial district on our left and 1^st Hill on the right, where several hospitals are (the neighborhood is nicknamed “Pill Hill”) that something floated directly, noiselessly over the car. I think it moved from right to left, and it flew more or less like a helicopter, crossing the freeway and going between the tall buildings of downtown. It was easy, superficially, to dismiss this as a helicopter, except there was no helicopter there, not that I could see. Rather, it was all glowing and golden, seemed to have a plain shape like an iron I-beam, and was strung with all colors of hanging lights along tangled wires like a Christmas tree, one rather sloppily decorated. Add to that how it flew into the narrow spaces in between buildings, and the whole picture becomes very strange. I’d thought at the time that it must be a helicopter, though, landing at the helipad of one of the hospitals – which maybe it was. Maybe I remember it in reverse: that it came out from between the buildings and headed for the hill. This was certainly how I thought of it for at least a year afterwards. But it always haunted me, because there was something subtly not right about it – like, for instance, the ridiculously gaudy decorations and unsafe flight pattern.

Neither Birdy nor I said anything about it. We’d both seen it, clear as day, although it was night. It was impossible to miss. We had some time after parking the car to nose around the University Campus before the reading. Still, I can’t remember it ever coming up between us. We found a dark corner and smoked a little weed, then went on into the lecture hall for the event. When Robbins came to the stage, after the applause had died down and a few introductory remarks, he read from a new story, something not yet published, which he explained, “This is a story about how I saw a UFO.”

Addendum to the above entry:

Riding the airporter shuttle back to Whidbey from SeaTac last week, I had a chance, as we passed through the above-mentioned stretch of the I-5 corridor, to take a good, close look at the conditions there as I would have seen them so many years ago, approaching from the same direction. The spaces between the buildings at that exact spot were much wider than the concentration of high-rises only a block or two further north, and there seems in fact to be a helipad at Harborview Hospital that more or less abuts the freeway. Everything about the location admits the likelihood that what I saw was exactly what I half-way took it as: a Medivac helicopter coming in for a landing, or, alternately, taking off again.

Except there is still the matter of its appearance. I perhaps didn’t see it entirely clearly, but I have always remembered in such stark detail the weird, loose hang of that string of lights beneath the aircraft, run from one end to the other, and the vivid golden color of something – these details and the lack of any coherent shape to the object. There was no “helicopter” that I could see, only a minimal structure supporting sloppily-hung, ornamental lights. There was also no sound as this machine floated low and directly overhead.

Like with so many of these “encounters”, I feel like I’m being played with, and it may be no one but myself and my imagination in this tricksterish role. Yet there is, so often, just enough unlikely detail to let me doubt these dismissals, and either add support to self-delusion, or ask that I look more deeply through the cracks.

Revenge of Floaty Military Thing

My last post described a strange military jet airplane that seemed to float silently beside the highway in mid-day, over a patch of woods not far from where I live. It’s been several months since I wrote that post, but I have thought of this sighting many times since then. Not obsessively, and not to attach any particular significance to it. I really don’t imagine that this airplane was necessarily anything but what it appeared to be, which was a normal military jet that seemed to behave strangely. Yet I’ve also allowed it to signify a certain possibility of meaning, and in so doing, certain synchronistic or curious phenomena constellated around it [link previous post and addenda here].

I’ve noticed something else curious in how I think of this as well. I now remember it differently from how I did before. In this new memory – which I tell myself is not how I saw it, yet which persists, seemingly of its own – there are two impossible features. The first is that the airplane had a long, silver-metallic pole that stuck down several meters from the belly of its fuselage, that may have also had a blinking light at the tip of it. This feature is identical to a sighting that I had of an actual UFO in the late 1980’s [link to post here]. If this pole or antenna were actually jutting from the underside of the plane, it would’ve been impossible to land without breaking it, or at least retracting it. Also, to say it again, I’m quite certain this feature wasn’t there at the time, yet, despite this, I can’t seem to help but remember it this way. The other addition or distortion I have is even stranger: I distinctly remember there being a hatchway open, also on the underside of the fuselage, and a man in a white sweatshirt who wore a flight helmet, leaning out of the opening, smiling and waving down at the traffic that passed beneath, perhaps specifically at me. This is just bizarre, like some cartoon version of what actually happened. Yet every time I think of it, this is how it appears to me in memory.

I postulate nothing about these reconfigured memories beyond what they present themselves as, yet both features have curious referents. The pole or antenna relates directly back to a UFO sighting of my early adulthood. The smiling man who waves reminds me of an attempted kidnapping when I was quite young, when a man tried to entice me into his car. He pulled the car up beside me, opened one of the back doors, and smiled brightly and with one arm, gesturing for me to climb inside. Since I’d been warned about exactly this at a recent school rally, I knew to run away, and that’s what I did. But the knowledge that things could have gone very differently for me has never been far from mind, and though it may seem a stretch, to relate this early incident to what I imagine seeing a man in a airplane doing, the psychological association of “abduction” is valid, because what I’m describing is fundamentally a psychological event, with the concept of the UFO as an invisible, though central, constellating event.

Memory seems never to be only one thing. In fact it isn’t. Yet memory has been the underlying and constant theme throughout these posts, since all are based on memories of observations and impressions, either near or distant in time. Moreover, these recollections are the interpretations of memory – descriptions, which exist apart from the memories themselves and may be more or less accurate, yet are not the thing itself. The description is unavoidably a modification of the memory, a shaping of recalled sense impressions and thoughts and feelings into words, which recollection itself is an ever-shifting modification from the original experience. There are gaps between these things, epistemological gaps and reinterpretations. And though I’ve tried to describe what experience I’ve had as accurately and truthfully as possible, I know that these distortions are an inevitable result of the highly plastic medium of consciousness – a consciousness impacted by this image or idea of the secularly numinous, which in some cases, and from a certain perspective, can be described as contact experience with the UFO – which are exactly the spaces this original sighting and its memory seem to be playful within. A trickster. A shape-shifter. Yet I don’t know that anyone is doing it to me but myself.

This is the nature of the recognition, what I call the alien as myself, as it is my own consciousness which seems to be the most fundamentally mysterious thing to me, and my experience, as such, of the UFO or “ET” which provides the most direct portal to it, which fixes my attention on it, whatever the ultimate nature of that phenomenon is – self or other or both, or beyond such categorization.

Floaty Military Thing Invalidates All Thinking

I’d been driving north in the early afternoon last Friday (as of now, three days ago) between Coupeville and Oak Harbor, where a Naval Air base dominates the northern half of Whidbey Island both economically and demographically. To see military aircraft of different ages, from the very new to the old-but-still-flying, particularly this close to Oak Harbor, and in close proximity, is normal. There’s nothing in the least unusual about that. But when I saw a large military transport jet, deep gray-green, looking to be a newer sort and eerily hanging over the woods alongside the highway, it caught my eye for two reasons: first, I don’t normally see that large of an airplane along that particular route, especially flying that low (it was only a hundred or so yards above the treeline), though I couldn’t say that it never happens; but secondly, and most strangely, because it hardly seemed to be moving at all. It may not have been moving. It looked as though it simply floated over the forest.

I was driving in the opposite direction and moved past in relation to it, so any movement seemed like it could easily have been that of me going past at fifty miles an hour while it stood still in the air. If it flew (as opposed to simply floating like some kind of blimp) it hardly seemed to go even ten miles an hour. Also, I couldn’t hear the sound of any jets. My car stereo was up, not so very loud – enough to mask the ordinary sounds of the road – though I wouldn’t think a large military jet flying so close by would be overwhelmed by it, not hardly. It had a single, white, blinking light at the bottom of its fuselage. This for some reason also struck me as odd, or significant somehow, this single, plain light. Otherwise, it had no running lights that I could see.

I craned my neck around to watch it not moving as I passed nearby and under, looking as closely at it as I safely could in the highway traffic. I thought to pull off to the side, but there wasn’t enough of a shoulder to do it safely. I still wish that I had.

This sighting bothers me, for a few reasons. The obvious conclusion is that it is likely not a sighting of anything all that unusual. This was likely just some conventional military jet transport with vertical lift technology. The fact that it was so quiet is strange, certainly, but also not inexplicable. Perhaps jet technology has been developed that makes that little noise. I’ve seen fighters pass close over the I-5 freeway near Fort Lewis that I could scarcely hear from inside a car. If that’s all this was, I have no problem with that; I feel no need to try and spin something exotic out of the mundane. But the image of the thing haunts me, because there was something just wrong enough about it (and just public enough also, hovering that close to the highway) that I had to notice, and enough about it explicable enough, without any more than the common knowledge of military technology, that I also have to dismiss it, and I can’t escape this feeling that somebody is playing with me, because I am now stuck so firmly in this liminal zone of how I think of this thing. I wanted to write this up immediately, I was that intrigued by what I saw, but at the same time I keep thinking, it’s nothing, it’s nothing, don’t make a fool of yourself, tilting at windmills and the like. To post this is to invalidate the point of this site by making something out of nothing. But not to post it is to invalidate this work also, to communicate these moments of liminal strangeness.

Addendum:

Shortly after posting this, in the Oak Harbor coffee shop where I was working, in a nearby conversation that I couldn't help overhearing a man said, "I've been tilting at windmills..." Quixote lives.

Further Addendum:

Before seeing the strangely floating jet airplane last Friday (now one week ago, exactly, as I write this) I’d gone to the gym in Coupeville, and in its small parking lot, I noticed that the minivan I’d parked next to had one flat tire in back. It could’ve been somebody’s car from the physical therapy office that shared the building, but turned out to be that of the older woman inside, the only other person at the gym just then. She came outside and I showed it to her, and we hovered around her van for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do about it. We finally decided that calling AAA was probably the best thing. So I went on inside and had my workout, then found her still waiting in her van when I came out again. She told me that several people had stopped to tell her about the flat tire while she’d been waiting – a nice gesture, but by now she’d more than gotten the point. The tow truck should be along in a few more minutes, she said.

I got into my car and drove on to Oak Harbor, and it was along the way that I saw what I described above. I wondered at the time if there was some kind of connection between these things: the flat tire, my telling the old woman about it, and then this. It seemed reaching to look for any causal relationship, but the feeling that there was some connection nagged at me.

So when I came to the gym again, exactly one week later, that same older woman was there, cycling on one of the stationary bicycles beside the desk as I signed in. She told me that after waiting for the tow truck to come that day, after all those people also told her about the flat she now knew pretty well that she had, and several more hours spent at or around the tire shop, getting the flat fixed, that nobody could find anything wrong with the tire, other than it was flat, neither the tow truck driver nor the repairmen at the shop. Unless someone had come along and let the air out as a prank, the tire had gone spontaneously flat for no reason they could see.

This only added to my uneasy feeling that there was some kind of set-up, that the one thing led toward the other, with my awareness at the pivot point.