The Smith River cabin, the clear plastic roof, the travels at the speed of thought — and the curriculum that taught the inward turn decades early
A father with no money and no rockets built a transparent roof and taught his sons to travel inward — guided visualization under the open stars — decades before the essayist could argue that inward travel is what mature civilizations choose. The formation of the inward-turn thesis, and of the essayist, in one cabin.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
When we were boys, my father moved up to the Smith River, outside Crescent City — just under the Oregon border, on the California side. He was building a cabin there, and I say building because it wasn't finished when we arrived, so we helped him finish it. Two stories, one room deep. The top floor had a clear plastic roof — literally plastic you could see through — which is a terrible idea from an energy-efficiency standpoint, since it has approximately zero insulation. But that was the point. We wanted to see the stars and not get wet when it rained, and my father, given a choice between warmth and the sky, chose the sky and built accordingly.
We slept up there almost every night, and the summers were mostly clear. And it was under that roof that he taught us astral projection. I can describe the method exactly, because I have never forgotten it: you look at the stars, you close your eyes, and you feel your body — he gave us a vivid image for this — as something blue and translucent. You let that blue self rise. It was guided meditation and visualization, is what it was, delivered by a master, and then we would go: up through the roof we could already see through, out over the world, zooming down wherever we wanted, traveling wherever we chose. We traveled in space with my dad all the time. It was amazing. Those are some of my fondest memories. What I notice now is what it was structurally: in a cabin with no money and no rockets, my father had worked out that the richest travel available to a mind is inward, and that a roof you can see through beats a vehicle you cannot afford. The essay this record feeds — The Unification of All Faiths and Science through Consilience — spends a chapter arguing that whole civilizations reach the same conclusion; my father got there first, at bedtime.
We were homeschooled in that cabin, in the middle of the forest, by a man who was — I say this as a plain description — a super genius. We grew our own food, so life consisted of working, cutting wood, and talking, and the talking went on for hours, which is to say the talking was the school. When we weren't at the cabin we were at the commune — the Magic Forest — where the people were lovely and the buildings were warmer than my father's, though the conversation was not. And into that curriculum came Erich von Däniken. Chariots of the Gods was in the cabin the way it was in half the cabins in America in those years, and we loved it — and then the movie came out, and we loved that too: the Olmec heads — the colossal stone heads of Mexico's Gulf Coast that look for all the world like men in space helmets, with the broad features we argued looked more African than American Indian (archaeologists say they are portraits of local Olmec rulers, but archaeologists were not invited to our cabin) — the ancient sites, the whole gorgeous audacity of it. Years later, at Stanford, a friend of mine — a Swiss journalist, a visiting scholar at the business school — told me all about von Däniken, because he was Swiss and she knew him. The world is small, and it enjoys reminding you.
I should say that the spiritual curriculum had two campuses, because my mother ran the other one. My mother believed in everything good and spiritual — that is the most precise description I can give, and she would accept it. When we moved into the little converted chicken coop that had previously been occupied by Wiccans — nice witches — she cleared out the drug paraphernalia and the dried-out weed, but she kept the Ouija board. Made me dust it off, in fact, and we used it every once in a while. I thought it was ridiculous. It was also fun. In my family those two judgements were never considered to be in conflict.
A transparent roof, a blue translucent body rising through it, a paperback about ancient astronauts, and a Ouija board kept on principle: the curriculum looks eccentric until you state what it taught. It taught that the sky is worth more than the insulation, that the richest travel is inward, and that two judgements — ridiculous and fun, sacred and mechanical — can be held at once without conflict. The architecture in this corpus is that lesson with a theorem attached, and the essay is where the theorem lives.
Episodes are building blocks. The same material appears in more than one where it belongs in more than one, and every claim traces back to a primary source.
Selma, 1965 — and the promise
Open →In the graphConsilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →In the graphA clothing-discouraged commune, and an education in what people do when nobody makes them
Open →In the graphTwo stories, one room deep, finished by the boys who arrived to live in it; the classroom of the inward turn
Open →In the graphChariots of the Gods, the Olmec heads, and the gorgeous audacity that a father later folded into his theology
Open →In the graphHer mother read tarot and believed in everything; she loved Hare for accepting her family exactly as they were; she hugged him through the whole announcement
Open →These are specific and addressed to named people. If you are one of them, or know one, a single reply closes an item that has been open for twenty-five years.
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