Tabatha and I sat around the campfire. We watched sparks fly into the night sky, enchanted by the oak staves dancing in the fire.
We had kayaked over to the Indian mound and set up a tent with the plan of spending two days and a night, maybe even more, just enjoying the Florida wilderness. February was the best of all months in Florida-we both agreed on that fact.
One of the sections of oak collapsed, shooting more sparks in the sky to mesmerize us with the beauty.
Tabatha had given me this little dried-up mushroom; it didn’t look like much, and I had grudgingly eaten it. It tasted like dirt and had no effect at all. A waste of time, I thought.
“This will make your stories funnier and make the fire interesting to watch,” said Tabitha.
“Tastes like nothing, maybe some dirt flavor. It is a dirty mushroom.
“Just wait till I throw a palm leaf on the fire; it is like a door to the other; at the edge of the illumination, you will see hints of the night stalkers. Mostly harmless, but they hate being pointed out.”
We sat beside each other, sharing heat and watching the flames dance. It was too early in the year for the million frogs that would be crooking their chorus along the St. Johns River, but the night herons called out their eerie calls, a reminder of another Florida, now past.
“What do you mean mostly?” I asked.
I checked my watch, “Any minute now. There! We watched the International Space Station fly across the sky.
“It has a wobble,” said Tabitha, giggling.
“Why is it wobbling?” I asked.
Tabatha just laughed.
Mental confiscation, from the innermost recesses of thoughts, flowed eccentricities and lucidity: “Fragrant forest shelter in a shining summer storm, whispering rain,” I said aloud.
Where did that come from?
“Evoke the wind spirit to make the air rich with power,” muttered Tabitha.
In the firelight, her hair fell about her in nimble curls.
A breeze came from the river to fan the campfire in new sparks.
She was smooth and attentive in conversation, with her soft lies and contagious laughter.
Unforeseen senses of bewildered emotional energy azure in taste, the stars were perambulated tangrams of unknown destinations.
What have you given me to eat?
“Hey, I got a story,” I said after hearing the night herons call out again.
The night herons hunting along the river called out a plaintive, “Tell-her-tell-her.”
Tabatha groaned again-a fake groan, her favorite sound when I had a crazy idea-like camping on the Indian Mound or drinking in an oak tree.
“Yeah, I got a story, and it’s really kind of weird,” I said.
She giggled again.
In a remarkable twist of events, Barbara took pains to avoid me, while Tabitha greeted me efficaciously whenever I got out to the Cabbage Palm fish camp.
“It’s about an Indian,” I said. “Maybe about an Indian. Let me back up,” I said.
I figured Tabatha would like this story because she and Barbara had something going on. I don’t know if I would call Tabitha Wiccan, but something was going on between the two women, spells, magic, and stuff.
“So when I left the Air Force, I met this girl.”
“Ohhh, another surfboard story, asked Tabitha.
“No, let me finish.”
I adjusted the logs in the too-orange fire.
“I met this girl when I was in Air Force, and her mother was into psychics and past loves, I mean past lives-some crazy stuff.
So I said, “Let me give this a go or something like that,” and signed up for the meditation classes. It was okay, but I almost never believed the stuff the lady teacher was saying. I mean, the yoga-type breathing and stilling the mind stuff was okay, but the odd stuff, I did not believe her.”
Tabitha stopped her giggling, and I had her attention; I could see her breathing change, but then that might be the dirt-tasting mushroom having some effect.
“But one of the things she said that stuck with me a little bit was that when you do meditation, you open yourself up to the possibility of visits or even takeover by entities.
That is my word-entities. The teacher-instructor used more colorful names that made the entire conversation more silly than it was.”
I had Tabatha’s undivided attention now; her brown eyes looked at me from across the fire, then we were next to each other.
No, she was across the fire, but we had been sitting next to each other
“Anyway, I just wanted to throw that info out as a background to the story. Also, as a kid, I used to hunt and collect arrowheads. You have them in England?”
Tabitha shrugged; I don’t know.
Growing up near where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers come together, there were billions of artifacts, so it wasn’t hard to do that as a hobby.”
Tabitha’s brown eyes had grown larger in the firelight.
I briefly considered stopping the story.
“But my favorite spot to hunt arrowheads…..Hey, normally I don’t tell people this story, that mushroom…..”
The night heron croaked, “Tell-her-tell-her.”
For some reason, the heron made both Tabitha and I laughed.
“When is a dream, not a dream but something else?” I asked her and the night bird.
“Fragrant forest shelter in a shining summer storm, whispering rain,” said Tabitha, mimicking my Ozark accent.
“Where did that come from?” Is that Chaucer or that dude chasing windmills?”
“Ship of Fools,” said Tabitha in her mix of England and southern drawl redneck speech.
Nothing so attractive on the planet, I thought.
“Your story?” asked Tabitha.
“Tell-her-tell-her,” called the night heron.
“Okay, okay, before the weird part, the sort of normal part. One of my favorite spots to hunt arrowheads was on a bluff-almost a cliff, but you could still walk or crawl up the hill. This steep hill overlooks where two streams came together. Dardenne and Kraut-run creeks. Three springs at the bottom of the ‘almost a cliff’ and a Native American burial mound on top of the hill.
You know, not more than a hundred yards away on the next bluff is a pioneer cemetery. Isn’t it weird that cultures oceans and millennia apart used the same locations for a graveyard?”
Tabitha was suddenly quiet.
“I want to see both these spots,” said Tabitha. “They are power spots, are they not?”
Uh-oh, her magic stuff again.
“Wait, wait, let me finish my story, and I don’t know; maybe you will not want to visit.” At least not in your dreams.
Oddly enough, I could smell Tabitha’s excitement.
“Wait, so just a heads up, some of this story is only about a dream.”
“Only a dream?” she almost whispered the words.
We had all night on the river might as well explain it all.
“So you know, the best spear point in my collection comes from this bluff. I have been told the blade is museum quality.
On top of this bluff, there used to be an Indian mound, but the farmers in the 1800s leveled it. I used to talk to the old farmers because they would show me their arrowhead collections.”
“And the bones,” asked Tabitha. “The bones in the burial mound-we call it a barrow when I was growing up, barrows with barghests.”
“The bones were plowed into fertilizer, I suppose. What the hell is a barghest? I asked.
Tabitha laughed; it was almost a forced laugh, I thought in my slightly addled brain.
“A barghest is a barrow ghost.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said.
Tabitha added another section of firewood to the orange-red fire.
The sweetest smile in the flickering firelight. “That’s okay; they may not believe in you either.”
Her laughter told me she found the comment extra funny.
She wiped her eyes.
“Please, Rocket City man, continue your story; I like it a lot; it’s better than your surfboard stories.”
“Rocket City Man, I kind of like that.”
“That bluff? When the fields were not plowed, I would search that bluff; sometimes, the hill was so steep I would be crawling up, and when going downhill? Pick a path based on what trees you could grab or slide into so you do not roll two or three hundred feet downhill.
Never found anything on that bluff, but my neighbor found a Civil War sword on the next bluff north of the cemetery.”
“And your story?” asked Tabitha.
“Sorry, okay, so when is a dream, not a dream?” I asked again.
I felt a rush of blood-a sort of high; it was always a good feeling when a woman was paying as much attention to you as Tabitha was.
“All good things have to come to an end, and I joined the United States Air Force and was sent here to Rocket City.”
I recalled my first day at Patrick Air Force Base. Humid and warm in January-it sucked; it was unnatural.
“While down here in Florida, actually right around the time I took those mediation classes, I started having the same dream.
I was on that steep bluff, just below the old Indian mound, and discovered a cache of finely crafted spear points—elaborate ceremonial flint blades. Special items that Native Americans had hidden sometime in the distant past, you see, they did not have storage units, and a cache of blades is found by one out of twenty arrowhead hunters.
You know, like in England, people would hide stuff from the Romans or Vikings, and then for whatever reason, the owners did not return?”
Anyway, I would have the same dream over and over-weird, right?”
I stopped to choose my words carefully and lowered my voice.
“It was only a dream? Right? The few people I tell this story to, I usually ask, “Was this an out-of-body experience or some vivid dream?”
Boy, did I have Tabitha’s attention.
“One dream, I bent down to inspect the cache of magnificent spear points when suddenly I was body-slammed from up the hill. I rolled a few times and turned around-hey, Hey! That’s a clue, I was on the part that is not so steep, or I would have a dozen times until I hit a tree.
I looked to see what had knocked me down; it was a man, a Native American. He was standing over the cache of Spearpoints, and he was literally the ugliest person I have ever seen in my life. The DNA profile was definitely Native American, broad cheek-boned face, but the hair was not as straight as usual. The face was scared but not in a pattern, I don’t know, and the hairstyle wasn’t in the grooming style I am familiar with, more like a modern homeless look, no grooming. And the clothes-they were not like Hollywood or what George Catlin painted. Weird but not too out of sync.
The total package screamed danger.
No words were exchanged, but the warning was obvious: “Stay away from his spearpoints.”
I woke up immediately and said, “Wow!”
Tabitha was breathing in gulps, nearly hyperventilating.
I looked at her across the fire, “You know that dream stopped then, never had it again. And about that time, I dropped out of the meditation class. I won’t say I dropped the classes because of the dream warning, but you know when I explained about the teacher’s warning of visits from entities? As I said, it may have been just a powerful dream, but when is a dream more than just a dream?”
Tabitha giggled.
“You never went back in your dreams?” asked Tabitha; she hissed and then giggled.
“Not in dreams.” I said, “But every time I entered the MR340 kayak race, I would go to that bluff and look around. I mean, it is a cool spot above the two creeks. I can see why the natives and pioneers both liked the area.”
Tabitha crossed herself.
I thought you were Wiccan or a witch or something.
“And you stopped that meditation?” She asked very seriously.
“Yes, I did. Didn’t have time for it.”
She was sitting beside me again, sharing heat; how did she move without me noticing?
“I should take you there sometime?” I asked.
“I don’t know now,” she said, her English accent thicker. “Sounds like playing with fire, hanging around cemeteries and stuff.”
She turned her head up and closed her eyes for a kiss.
The following day, I blew on the coals to start the fire and put some biscuits in a Dutch oven.
I crawled into the tent to wake Tabitha, and she grabbed me by the neck and pulled me to the sleeping bag.
“Rocket City Man,” she whispered.
I kissed her and gave a warning, “A little after 9 am, there should be two sonic booms from the Space Shuttle Columbia landing. Get ready.”
I broke her grip around my neck and looked at my watch.
They should be starting the De-orbit burn about now.
“Ten minutes,” I said. “Come on out, sleepy-head, and see if we can spot the space shuttle.”
Tabitha climbed out of the sleeping bag, her hair disheveled, her clothes wrinkled and beautiful.
“Any minute now, brace for the sonic booms of the orbiter landing a Kennedy.
By 9:16, no booms, “They must have landed at Edwards, I guess.”
And pulled Tabitha back into the tent.
Enjoying a beautiful Florida morning with a disheveled English woman.
~
President Bush addressesed the nation from the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston during a memorial service Feb. 4, 2003, in honor of the seven astronauts who died in the space shuttle Columbia disaster.
“This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human heart. We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return. They go in peace for all mankind, and all mankind is in their debt.
Yet, some explorers do not return. And the loss settles unfairly on a few. The families here today shared in the courage of those they loved. But now they must face life and grief without them. The sorrow is lonely; but you are not alone. In time, you will find comfort and the grace to see you through. And in God’s own time, we can pray that the day of your reunion will come.”
