Love Through Stone

Prophetic Dreams After Big Sur UFO Encounter, 1973

Chapter Twelve: Love Through Stone

Still dark. Still in the sleeping bag on the bluff. Covered in dew. But I'm also somewhere else, deep within myself, dreaming -

I'm at an airport. There is a lot of hassling and intrigue - coordination of movements between several people and myself. Finally, I get on an airplane and we are flying to Africa.

We land… I am wandering barefoot through warm mud out of which waist high field grasses grow. There is a huge rock-boulder nearby. Across the field, less than a mile away is a tribal African village. The streets are made of mud, cleared of grasses. On either side of the streets are beautiful bamboo-structured houses with straw thatched roofs. None of these buildings has walls - only a matted floor, thatched roofs and supporting columns of bamboo.

The sun is shining very brightly and hundreds of black native Africans are dancing in unison through the streets. Many are naked, some wear brightly patterned materials as capes and head-dresses. The sound of drums and powerful, overwhelming group chanting fill the air and ripple over to where I am, wandering thru the field.

As I move along thru the golden yellow wheat type of grasses, feeling my toes in the warm mud, I come upon three dazzlingly beautiful stones, each about the size of a peach pit. Each one is translucent, and neither in original rough form - they are as if timeless and definitely not from the hands of man. One is white, one is pink and one is yellow. They are laying in the mud. I gather them up and clean them off in some nearby stream. Carefully I put them in my toga pocket.

Then I pass thru the village, causing absolutely no panic or disturbance, even tho' I am white and western. As I am walking along the village street which runs parallel to the ocean shore I pass a sort of refreshment porch where a phone rings.

It is my mother.

We begin to talk - she has called long distance from the states.

The dream is vivid, more real than the California coast sleeping beneath me. But I understand it even as I dream it. Three stones found in African mud—white for clarity, pink for the heart, yellow for abundance. Old meanings, maybe older than language. Formed over millennia under impossible pressure, carbon and minerals compressed until they become something else entirely. The ancients knew what geology confirms: transformation requires crushing weight. In mythology, stones hold memory, intention, the concentrated essence of what pressure creates. But every symbol carries its shadow.

All those moves. Seven houses before I turned eight. Not my mother's fault—my father's ambition, his restlessness, always the next better position. Each move a small erasure. The kids next door I'd just learned to play with. The girl in second grade who shared her crayons. Gone before anything could root.

In the village, everyone grows up together. Boys and girls playing in the same mud. Learning each other's faces, fears, dreams. Not separated at thirteen. Not sent to stone towers where girls existed only as theory, as weekend visitors to dances where we stood against opposite walls.

The rhythm of community. Of continuity. Of Tuesday following Tuesday in the same place with the same people. The rhythm I never experienced. Always the new kid. Then the boarding school kid. Then the college kid who didn't know how to talk to girls about ordinary things because I'd never had ordinary time with them.

White for the purity they wanted me to maintain. Pink for all the brief connections—fumbling in dorm rooms, a night here, a morning there. Yellow for the illumination that never came. The understanding of how to be friends first. How to know someone slowly. Having the chance to stay.

But yellow also for the impossible light yesterday. Those objects reading the ocean like a book. The way they moved outside physics, outside comprehension. The way they made the ocean transparent, revealing depths we're not meant to see. Maybe love works the same way—operating by rules we don't understand, reading histories written in water and salt and time.

"Where are you?" she asks.

"Africa," I answer.

"Are you eating?" The eternal mother question. She loves me. Always has. The moves, the boarding schools—always yielding to my father's choices. How could she know the price?

"I found something missing in my closet." The $80. She knows. Has always known. But her silence is permission, not judgment. She understands the need to leave even as she knows why I couldn't stay.

First light at Bixby Creek. The dream dissolves but leaves its residue. Body aching from rocks beneath the sleeping bag. Mind trying to file the in-fileable—UFOs reading the ocean's memory, Jerry's blessing, this prophetic dream. Shared reality or shared hallucination or maybe there's no difference.

Yesterday we stood frozen at the cliff's edge, watching the impossible. Those spheres moving like thoughts. Reading the Pacific like scripture. Making the ocean transparent. If they could read water's memory, what memories do we carry? What histories are written in our cells that we can't decode?

Pack up. The three dream stones aren't physical but I carry them anyway. Walk to the highway. Thumb out.

Still processing what we saw. Dozen witnesses to the impossible. The way those objects stopped time, or stretched it. The way they moved—instantaneous relocation, like editing film. ZIP. Here then there with no between. Maybe that's how love works too when you finally understand it. No transition. Just suddenly there, where you were always meant to be.

A Chevy wagon stops. Surfer heading home to Santa Maria. Doesn't want to talk. Fine. Windows down, salt air washing through. The PCH curves past Hearst Castle—that other monument to acquisition and emptiness. Through San Simeon, Cambria, Morro Bay. Each town a postcard from a California that's dying.

The ocean on our right still holding whatever information those objects came to read. Every wave a word. Every current a chapter. What chapter am I? What story written in my movements, my failures?

Santa Maria appears like a mirage of the possible. Low-slung, unpretentious. Adobe and stucco. Mission bells marking the hours. Old woman watering geraniums. Kids on bikes, innocent as playing cards in spokes. The Pacific rolling in, waves breaking on eternal sands.

I could live here. The thought arrives complete. After all the motion, all the searching. This quiet coastal town. Get a room, a job. Learn to surf. Become nobody in particular. Let the three stones settle.

But could I? Could I learn the Tuesday after Tuesday? The girl at the coffee shop who'd eventually know my name. The slow accumulation of shared jokes, shared silences, shared time. The ordinary magic I missed by always being sent elsewhere.

"This is me," the surfer says. His words echo, like I had just said them.

Out on Main Street. Walk to the highway edge. The fantasy dissolves. The road still calling. Always calling. Not because I want to leave but because I have to keep moving. It's all I've ever known. Never learned the rhythm.

Thumb out. A flower van. Santa Barbara. Then a Datsun to Ventura. Then a semi to LA's eastern edge.

Watch California die by degrees. Eucalyptus surrenders to billboards. Two-lane becomes four becomes six becomes eight. Air thickens, browns. Mountains vanish behind progress. Orange groves bulldozed for the American dream—three bedrooms, two baths, no walls.

But walls everywhere. The ones I learned at Exeter. In Schoolboys Abroad. That foster family in Rennes I never connected with. The careful distance from girls who remained mysterious as foreign countries. I knew the mechanics—had fumbled through enough encounters. But not the friendship underneath. Not the dailiness that transforms bodies into people.

Ontario. Concrete in every direction. Strip malls and car lots. The anti-village. No mud streets, no dancing. Just asphalt and isolation.

The on-ramp's occupied. Two guys, early twenties. The tall one—maybe 6'2", rangy build, sun-bleached hair hanging past his collar—pushes the hair back with oil-stained fingers. Faded Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt with the sleeves cut off. His Louisiana drawl bleeds through: "Where you headed, man?"

His partner's shorter, built solid like a fire hydrant. Black hair cut rough, like he did it himself. Pearl-snap Western shirt buttoned to the wrists despite the heat. Watching traffic with careful eyes.

"Austin."

"No shit? We're from Baytown. Just north of Houston."

The tall one spins a turquoise ring on his right hand—nervous habit. "I'm Geoff. This here's Jason."

Geoff and Jason. Three weeks on the road. Apple picking in Washington, trimming in Humboldt. Now heading home broke but not broken. We recognize each other—carriers of invisible stones.

Geoff talks. Draft number 58. "Cousin went to Nam. Came back wrong. Real wrong." He lights a Marlboro. "Got a shrink to write me up. Anxiety disorder." He laughs. "Who doesn't have anxiety about dying in a rice paddy?"

Jason's quieter. Holds up his left hand briefly—pinky and ring finger gone. "Oil field accident. Disability check every month. Not much, but it's something." He watches traffic like it might attack, always positioning himself to see what's coming.

We stand in shifts. Cardboard sign: EAST. The sun hammers. Concrete radiates stored heat. The mother I left would hate this—her son begging rides from strangers. But the mother in the dream understands. Sometimes you have to leave to find what home never had.

But you can't wash away distance. Can't clean off years of separation. The girls I knew for a night, a week—instead of years. The ones I met at college, already formed by friendships I'd never had. Sarah that night at Penn—beautiful, generous, gone by morning. Not because I failed but because she already belonged to someone else.

Those objects yesterday knew how to read depth. How to make the ocean reveal its memories. But I'm still learning to read the surface of human connection. Still decoding the basic language everyone else learned in coed hallways.

Hours pass. Smog burns our eyes. A cop cruises, slows, moves on.

"California's done with us," Geoff says.

A kid on a skateboard stops. Sixteen maybe. "You guys need water? There's a hose behind the Chevron."

We drink. Chlorine and pipe rust but cold. The kid wishes us luck, rolls away. Small kindness in the concrete desert.

A van pulls over. We run. Blue paint, Nevada plates, engine ticking.

"Fuel pump's sketchy," the driver says. "Might make Phoenix. Might not."

We pile in. Beggars, choosers. The van smells like old cheese and pine-sol. Geoff and Jason in back. Me riding shotgun..

The driver's maybe thirty-five. Acne scars, nervous energy. "Lost my ass at the Sands. Thought I had a system." Bitter laugh. "House always has a better system."

That's what I've learned. To pass through without disturbance. Without connection. Every woman on this journey teaching me something but nothing lasting. Lucy with her love that couldn't include me. Sasha who loved women but healed me anyway. The unnamed others. All of them kind. All of them knowing this was a one night stand. Not because they're cruel but because that was the frame of the moment we shared.

But yesterday those objects showed another way of being. Instantaneous. Present. Reading the deep instead of skimming the surface. ZIP. Here then there with no transition. Maybe that's what real connection feels like—sudden, complete, operating by different physics.

East through the sprawl. San Bernardino. Riverside. Each city bleeding into the next. No boundaries. No dancing. Just more concrete, more cars, more people trying to be elsewhere.

Finally mountains rise. San Gorgonio Pass. Desert announcing itself. The van coughs, shudders. Driver nurses it to an exit.

"That's all she wrote, boys."

Out in Cabazon. Truck stop. Dinosaur statues—concrete dreams of what's extinct. We thank him, wish him luck.

Stand at the eastern ramp. Sun setting, turning mountains purple. Ahead, the Mojave opens like the anti-ocean.

A Peterbilt approaches. Geoff deploys his Louisiana charm. The truck stops.

"Phoenix," the driver says. "That work?"

We climb up. Coffee and Marlboros. Willie Nelson playing low. The desert swallows us whole.

Darkness coming. LA behind us like a mother we never met. Stars appearing—the village dancers of the night sky. Geoff and Jason plan Austin—where they'll stay, what bands they'll see.

They talk about girlfriends waiting. Not conquests but continuities. The girl from high school who still writes. The one who knows their middle names, their favorite foods, their Tuesday selves. They have what I don't—practice at staying connected. Faith that someone thinks of them at 3 PM on random afternoons.

I watch the desert roll past. Thinking about Santa Maria. That quiet town I'll never see again. That life I won't live. Already becoming memory.

Thinking about those objects reading the ocean. How they found patterns invisible to us. Information in the foam. Stories in the current. Maybe that's what I'm missing—not the ability to connect but the ability to read the patterns. To see the information that's already there. To understand that love has its own physics, its own way of moving through time.

"I love you," she says in the dream and in memory.

"I know." And I do. This distance isn't her fault. She gave what she had—ice cream, the beach, endless hugs across miles. If I couldn't stay, it's not because she didn't love me. It's because the world kept spinning us to new places before I could learn that staying was possible.

Three stones. Three lessons. Three ways forward.

The truck carries us east through the gathering dark, away from the ocean that remembers everything, toward whatever redemption waits in the desert.

But somewhere ahead—I can feel her like the desert feels rain coming. A woman who'll see through the boarding school distance. Who'll teach me Tuesday after Tuesday. Who'll show me that staying isn't a trap but a deepening. That knowing someone slowly is its own journey. That I'm not broken, just untaught in the daily grace of continuity.

Maybe she'll move like those objects moved. ZIP. Suddenly there in my life with no transition. Or maybe she'll teach me to read the deep patterns, the information written in ordinary moments, the love that accumulates like sediment until it becomes stone. But we will find each other in the staying. In the accumulation of ordinary mornings. In the physics that turns time into trust.

Geoff sleeps. Jason sleeps. The driver focused on white lines and Willie Nelson.

I'm awake, carrying my three stones across America. Each one a lesson in what I missed. Each one a promise of what's possible. Not looking for sex—I've had that. Looking for what I hope is possible. The impossible magic of knowing and being known across time. The certainty of being loved simply for who I am.

The universe has doors. Sometimes they open. Sometimes you're standing there with your dick out when impossible things happen. But sometimes—maybe—they open onto love that operates by different rules. That moves like light through water. That reads the memories we carry without knowing.

We are all motherless, dancing toward dawn.

But some of us are just learning the steps.

Some of us are still finding the rhythm.

Some of us need someone patient enough to teach us that love isn't leaving or being left.

It's staying until Tuesday becomes forever.

Until the ocean reveals its depths.

Until the impossible becomes ordinary.

Until ZIP—suddenly you're there, where you were always meant to be.

The desert promises nothing except miles.

But somewhere beyond those miles, she's waiting.

My girl.

I can feel her like the hope swelling in my heart.

Real as dream.

Patient as time.

Ready to teach me what I've been trying to learn since I was eight years old and moving again—how to stay, how to read the deep, how to love by different physics.

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→ Next Chapter: Chapter 13: The Ocean Don't Lie - "Desert crossing toward Texas with Geoff and Jason - the kindness of strangers continues"

← Previous Chapter: Chapter 11: ZIP! - "UFO encounter at Big Sur - impossible objects scan the Pacific like scripture"

📖 Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide

💎 The Three Stones: White for clarity, pink for the heart, yellow for abundance - symbols that carry through the entire memoir trilogy as markers of transformation.

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