Washington Rebel

Sighs Among the Bones -- What I Learned from the Hoh Rain Forest, Part II

 
Healing Place of the Soul

Modern man describes his situation in terms of "ADD" and "ADHD."  Whereas his ancestors' focused on seasons, and the phases of planets, the modern specimen's concentration, is enslaved to artificial stimulation.  An animal that operated for thousands of years upon the "gentle predictabilities of rural life" is now a rat in a cage administered by his corporate keepers.  The man-rat borrows money like a crazed gambler in search for the next piece of cheese.  Not even the prospect of a lonely, meaningless death deters him from an eerie, ritualistic barrage of nervous, agitated grasping which he luridly calls "life."

The difference between American government now, and American government three generations ago -- as illustrated by the "hope and change" mantra of the charlatans in charge of us -- is that the State has every intention of managing our slavery.  In truth, we are witnessing the consensual repeal of the 13th amendment.  Americans have voted with their souls: from Lawrence Welk to Marilyn Manson in two easy steps: starting with dependence, and then the auction of imagination to the most obscene bidder.  Our devil is cloaked with "compassion for the poor."  What we mean to say is, we're too torpid to take responsibility for our own welfare.

The average American no longer comprehends well-crafted sentences.  He is conditioned to the Soviet-style slogan.

Hope!  And Change!  (Arise Comrades!)

Strange times.

In rural settings of the past, folks understood that Nature was the Liber Mundi: Nature had a face.  "She" was referred to by names, whether comforting names, such as Demeter, or strange and terrifying names, such as Hecate.  The wise taught that her love must be won!  It could not be taken by force, not without a penalty.

"'Let no rash mortal Disturb this veil,' said he, 'till raised by me; For he who dares with sacrilegious hand To move the sacred mystic covering, He'--said the Godhead--" "Well?"--"'will see the truth.'"   The Veiled Image at Sais

With sacrilegious hand.  Who among you dares consider that you may wield a sacrilegious hand?  You claim salvation, whether in Jesus, or in "liberalism."  How can you be so certain of your superiority?  Suppose the Life Force regards you as ungrateful, and lazy?

How prophetic were these words, written in 1200 A.D.:

Modesty is a capstone over all the virtues.

Quite possibly our condition is simply diagnosed: like ADD or bipolar disorder, it may be chemical.  Not patriarchy, as self-righteous feminists aver, but the side effects of industrial, then post-industrial, then post-modern, successes.  Man has become the rat in the cage, and he has done so willingly.  Without even knowing it, he has altered the structure of his brain to render himself more obedient to the artificial rat-a-tat of busy-busy.  Like "mesmeric operators" of old, his captors mistakenly believe themselves free o'the con.  Look at Obama.  Do you see freedom in his face, or the distortion of our age?  That man is not free.  He's not even a man.

Magicians and healers of the past knew full well the power of suggestion.  In rejecting the operation of this principle as unscientific, we have become enslaved to its more negative manifestations.  We no longer power our own souls.  Our souls are captured in the large-scale machinery of our time.  How many of you sing?  How many of you see color?  How many of you swoon with ecstasy in the presence of silent, luxuriant Isis?

Will man escape?  Will he assert his freedom?

I think he will, but at a cost.

We'll take a look at the lever of freedoms in the next installment.

Merry Christmas!

The Reception of Sanctuary -- What I Learned from the Hoh Rain Forest, Part I

Poetic Echoes

I may be one of the few "doctors of the soul" alive that can see what's wrong with you all, but putting it into words is another matter.  Here is the tale of how it developed.  We'll see what we can do with it later.

In 1972, we moved to the Hoh Rain Forest, in the Olympic National Park.  As there was NO television reception, and only the most inconsistent radio reception, electronic stimulation came to a halt.  We were 32 miles from the nearest town, Forks, WA, in a place where it rained 144 inches a year.  There was no choice but to grow in the silence of the trees.

I was 15-years-old.  If I thought I was a reader before that summer, I was a reader in name only.  I grabbed the only two books I brought with me: A Mark Twain reader called 'Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race', and a copy of the first volume in a Saturday Evening Post series called Adventures of the Mind, a gift from my mother to my father, Christmas 1961.  It was still summer, and there was plenty to do outside.  Nevertheless, something inside me sprang to life.  I found myself drinking deep from the well of words.   You could say, without exaggeration, that I fell in love.  I fell instantly in love with the Hoh Rain Forest.  As a part of that Romance, I fell in love with thoughtful solitude.  Looking back, I can see how fortunate that was for me, just as I can see how rude and abrupt and ignorant the world we currently inhabit is.

My grandfather, a full-bloodied Irishman, almost died above the Hoh Valley building trail.  He loved the Hoh.  Made frequent visits there.  Something drew him.

Something drew my father there as well.  When the National Park gave him the option of which Park he wanted, there was no hesitation.

The Hoh Rain Forest.

And now I was there.  A most curious veil fell over the world of bombs and cars and tits and ego and money and self-importance, the constant, immodest, maniacal shilling of American television, the relentless drone of a bored, lifeless people seeking stimulation in the sick malignancy of modern life.  That world we left -- the world of people and cities and "fun" -- was distant, tinny sounding, disturbingly empty.  I felt no loss in rejecting it.  There was no mourning something I despised enough to wish its death.  Ease and peace grew over me as the world of carpetbagger shadows of men and their faithless mania receded.

 

Another veil lifted.  An interior light began to shine.

Hoh Rain Forest Thanksgiving

 

Where I Grewed Up

Matt Spivey asked his students what they knew about Thanksgiving.  Here is how your future responded:

"Isn't it to celebrate the final time we showed unity with the Indians before we massacred them?"

"I think some important document might've been signed that day, right?"

"Does it symbolize how the Native Americans taught white people how to cook?"

The Truth About Thanksgiving

As Steve McCann says, This Has Been a Dismal 12 Months.

I was fortunate to have grown up in a house where the human spirit did not have to compete with television commercials; where the intellect had the opportunity to grow under the stimulation of books and conversations.  To be absolutely honest with you, I don't much like your country: it's noisy, shoddy, and disrespectful.  It has buried the human soul under a mound of commercial stupidity.  Your kids spit and swear in public, expect things to be given to them without any effort on their part, and you are foolish enough to elect a con like Barack Obama on the same "moral authority" as you have raised your children.  In other words, you are children.  And not very nice ones, I might add.  What can I say?

You have a date with Satan.  I hope you like forced anal sex.

I'll tell you what I can say for this Thanksgiving.  I'm going to share with you the America you gave up.  Dare to take a walk back in time with me?

America was founded as a constitutional republic.  The nature and operation of that republic was immortalized in the Lincoln-Douglas debates (reenacted on C-Span), about which Neil Postman wrote:

Loggin' Bloggin'

Forks High School Gradjeeate (Class of '74) Kent T. sent me these pics with the following description:

"Dale and Deryl Huling hauling logs through downtown Forks. Two cuts from the same tree. One was 10,000 bf; the other 14,000 bf. There was a third log from the same tree bringing the total from the one tree to 35,000 bf. Likely logged by Brager Bros. Logging since they did all the logging for the Forks Shingle Co."

I was so intrigued by these specimens that I wrote Kent back immediately and asked for more details, whereupon I received the following:

"The pictures were taken about 1937-1940. The 'Associated' building in the background was located where the Rain Drop Cafe is now. The single family home behind the truck in the picture under the 'associated' picture in Oscar Walgren's home that was located where the library is now. Dale and Deryl Huling are my mother's brothers. After the war, they moved to Seattle and opened Huling Bros Chrysler Plymouth and later Huling Bros Buick in West Seattle. The two brothers married the two Hunley sisters from Forks (Ruth and Mae) in a dual ceremony in Forks around that same time.

"The Forks Shingle Co was owned by the Old Huling Brothers (Roy, Hot Water Harry, Les. Everett, and Francis). The mill was located between the Bogachiel Bridge and the Rain Forest Road where Grahams later set up shop in the 70's. The original mill burned down twice, once around 1941 and the last time in the late 60's or early 70's. The original mill was all run off steam including the generation of electricity for the family homes (thus the nick name 'Hot Water Harry' for the oldest of the brothers who did all the design work) They got in the shingle business in Raymond in the 1920's through the marriage of one of their sisters to Elmer Case who opened one of the first shingle mills in the state (or so I'm told) in the Raymond area (The Case Shingle Co).   Anything else?"

No, Kent, that'll about do it.  The mill he mentions belonging to the Huling boys is where we were dropped off by the school bus and picked up by my mother, who rode us the rest of the 23 miles or so home to the ranger station.

Good times!

The Huling brothers are the type of human Kent and I grew up around -- ingenious, resourceful, proud, and tough.  That was our America.

I liked -- and trusted -- that one better than this one.

Thanks, Kent.

 

 

Hohming Device

Secret Cities?

My grandfather Hanify helped build road into the Hoh Rain Forest shortly after the Olympic National Park was organized in 1938.  (Technically making improvements to the existing Forest Service Road, for you sticklers.)  When, in 1971, Regional Director John Rutter asked my Dad where he'd like to be the district ranger, there was no debating: the Hoh.  Thus was my life born in ways that can't be reduced to a blog post.

I was born physically at Olympic Memorial Hospital in 1957.  As a soul I was born in the Hoh Rain Forest, circa 1972.  I won't go into the details here -- they're preserved in a book manuscript.  Suffice it to say there is some connection in my blood, in my soul, that puts the Hoh Rain Forest at the center of things.  What drew my grandfather, an Irishman, to the place?  Why did my father feel compelled to go?  Those are interesting questions -- for me at least.  I can imagine no city on earth more exciting, more hunger-sating, more soul-stirring, than the Hoh Rain Forest, though I likewise confess that, as my blood kin and friends who fired my imagination then are no longer located there, it is not nearly the same when I go "home" now.

My homing instinct is so strong, I have been known to drive to the Hoh Rain Forest in the dead of night.  Now, when I was growing up there, there was no question that the entire Quinault area is lit up with a strange magic after the sun goes down.  Drive through there at night alone sometime, if you don't believe.  You will, unless you're a knucklehead.  I can tell you stories.

Peace

What is Consciousness?

In 1972, TV was taken from my family and replaced with Silence, books, and conversation.  When next I went to town to visit town friends, who joked about television commercials and swapped one-liners from prime time, I was able to measure something that had taken place: my world had expanded beyond the confines of the Hoh Ranger Station; theirs had shrunk to the confines of a little box.  Pretty startling realization for a 15-year-old!

What before had been a mere mania -- reading books -- now took on somber respectability, and it opened a wonderful door for me:

CONVERSATION

Let me give you an accurate diagnosis of what has happened in America: the average American is not at peace in solitude; the average American is not at peace in Nature; the average American is not at peace with the responsibility of self-correction as a virtue.

The average American is insane.

Conservatives, on balance, are relatively more sane, but only by a margin.  "Liberals" who make it their business to manage others are stark raving mad.

You.  Need to find peace.  And you can't do it until you unplug from the madness that has stolen your soul.

Let the fires of Vesta be ignited in your Soul.

Spiritual Sanctuary: Growing Up in the Hoh Rain Forest

 

Hoh River Boy (r) and His Friend Gary "Makkor" Cox (l) in 1976 at the Hoh Ranger Station -- Photo by Mary Lou Hanify

Washington Rebel is lucky to have as one of its contributors Hoh River Boy, author of WR's first two articles, Remembering Bud Hanify and The Speech of the Grail -- as well as the bloke who interviewed me!  I was able to corner him at one of his favorite haunts the other day.  Over 20 or 30 cups of real black coffee, we had a leisurely conversation, the Pacific Northwest way.  I had lots of questions.

IC  What's your book about?

HRB  It's about being "born" in the Hoh Rain Forest in the 1970s.  A variety of forces conspired to drop my family into the center of rain-shrouded isolation, armed only with books, and an Irish love of conversation.  No television; very infrequent radio reception, and then only late at night, when the cloud cover was just right.  Something came alive inside me within the container of that isolation, that darkness, a something that has instructed me throughout my life.  It's about spiritual sanctuary, and how badly sanctuary is needed in our crazed modern environment.  It's also about my older self trying to make his way back to the "hearth."  I guess you could say the book is about locating that sanctuary in the topography of the soul.

IC  I know the "hearth" is at the center of the story.  But first, tell me about writing

HRB  Not much to tell.  I was always more a reader than a writer.  My mother was a writer; her grandfather Morehead bought and sold newspapers his entire professional life, from Colorado to Washington.  Writing was all I ever heard about from my mother, but it was a madness that has never fully possessed me, even now.  I worked on the school newspaper at Forks High School and took journalism courses in college, but I really didn't work very hard at writing.  It wasn't until 1979 that I wrote my first logging story.

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Remembering Bud Hanify

   

Photo of "Ranger Bud" by Sam "What Ranch?" Nugent, aka the Mango Whisperer

Those were magic days, all right, when my Old Dad Charles B. "Bud" Hanify was the Hoh Ranger.  Although I've included considerable detail about me Da in my book manuscript, the following sketch is one of the nicest tributes I've ever seen (or heard) about my Dad.  Comes from childhood friend, Sue Tinney -- one of the major talents behind Gaia Consort.  This particular piece was included in the collaborative effort, Fast Moving Water.

Thanks, Susan.  And, uh, by the way . . . I remember you Tinney kids kiping money out of Taft Creek!  Heh.

The Speech of the Grail

 

Hoh Rain Forest

In 1972 we moved to the Hoh Ranger Station inside Olympic National Park.  I was 15-years-old. 

My father, Bud Hanify, started as a National Park Ranger in 1940; his father went to work for the Olympic National Park when it opened in 1938, building road.  My granddad's folks were from Ireland.  It always struck me as Providential -- ' kismetic' -- that he would be drawn to a place as green, or greener, than Ireland.