Sasha Among The Giants
Redwood Forest Peyote Vision Quest
Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
Chapter Eight: Sasha Among the Giants
Thumb out on 101 North. Need distance from Steve's darkness, his .38 gleaming like a bad promise. Morning fog lifting. First ride comes quick—electrician in a van, coffee breath and Merle Haggard on the radio.
"How far you going?"
"Far as you'll take me."
"Laytonville. That work?"
"Perfect."
Forty minutes of fog burning off. Hills getting higher, trees getting bigger. The electrician talking about Reagan, about how California's going to hell. I'm watching the forest thicken, feeling my chest expand with each mile north.
Laytonville. Little town pretending it's not changing. Loggers and hippies eyeing each other over coffee. Wait by the on-ramp. Two hours. Sun full up now. Finally—a family in a station wagon. Kids in back making faces. Mom nervous about picking up hitchhikers but Dad's a former Marine, figures he can handle one skinny kid with a guitar.
"Richardson Grove?" I ask.
"Going to Eureka. We'll drop you at Willits."
The kids get bored of making faces, fall asleep. The mother relaxes, starts telling me about their vacation, about seeing the tallest trees in the world. The father asks if I'm a musician.
"Learning to be."
"Play something."
But the guitar stays in its case. Not my vibe.
Willits comes too soon. Back to the roadside. Hotter now. Noon sun beating down. Trucks blowing past, not stopping. An hour. More. Throat getting dusty. Then—a stake-bed truck pulling over. Logger behind the wheel, Popeye arms and skeptical eyes.
"Where to?"
"Richardson Grove."
He looks at my hair, my pack. "You one of them tree-huggers?"
"Just need to see something beautiful."
That works. He waves me up.
Three hours of winding through afternoon. The logger—name's Carl—tells me about the job. About reading trees, knowing which way they'll fall. About widow-makers—dead branches that drop without warning. About choker accidents, and the danger of staubs. About friends crushed, friends crippled.
"But you keep doing it?"
"It's what I know." He gestures at the giants flashing past. "Besides, after the saws stop, when it's just you and the forest? Feels like church. Like God's actually listening."
The trees getting impossibly tall now. Redwoods. The first ones making me catch my breath. Carl sees it.
"Wait'll you see the real big ones. Make these look like saplings."
Richardson Grove entrance. Late afternoon light slanting through impossible trees. Carl drops me at the ranger station.
"Be careful out there. Forest ain't Disneyland. Respect it."
"I will."
Watching his truck disappear. Then turning to face the giants.
First night at the main campground. Families everywhere. Coleman lanterns and hot dogs. Not what I need. In the morning, pack up early. Follow the river upstream. Looking for the spots nobody goes.
Find it two miles up. A bend in the Eel where the water pools deep and green. Flat spot hidden by ferns big as umbrellas. Perfect.
Three days of nothing. Of everything.
First day: just sitting. Letting the road noise drain out of my head. Swimming in water so cold it erases everything but now. Lying naked on warm rocks afterward, watching hawks circle. The silence so complete I can hear my own blood.
Making camp minimal. No fire—don't need it. Sleeping bag on pine needles. Pack hung from a branch—Carl's stories about bears. Eating simple—dried apricots, almonds, the last of bread going stale. Drinking from the river after letting silt settle.
Second day: starting to hear it. The forest breathing. Each tree its own note in some impossible symphony. Walking barefoot on moss soft as flesh. Finding a grandfather tree, sitting with my back against bark older than Jesus. Insects moving in the grooves. Woodpeckers somewhere high, their knocking like drums.
Swimming again. Longer this time. Diving to where sunlight turns green-gold. Staying under until my lungs scream. Coming up gasping into a world that looks newborn.
That night, lying in the sleeping bag, stars visible through branches. A deer crashes through nearby. My heart hammering. Then settling. Part of it now. Just another animal in the forest.
Third day: empty. Good empty. The kind where you're just eyes and ears and skin. No more internal monologue. Watch American dippers dive for bugs. Study how light changes through the day—white to gold to amber to gone. Find cougar tracks by the river. Old ones, but still. The forest has teeth.
Mushrooms growing from a fallen giant. Orange and red and yellow. Like flowers made of flesh. Everything eating everything else. Everything becoming something new.
Running out of food. Down to the last handful of nuts, couple apricots. Time to rejoin the world. Hiking back to the day-use area. Throat dusty, that familiar emptiness that comes from days alone. Need water. Following signs to the fountain.
She's there. Filling water bottles. Blonde hair catching light that filters through two-thousand-year-old giants.
She turns.
Time stops.
Not slows—stops. The sound of water running, her friends laughing by a VW van painted with stars and moons, birds calling from impossible heights—all gone. Just her face and this slam of recognition so strong my knees almost buckle. My body knows her before my mind can form the thought.
You. It's you.
She feels it too. I watch it hit—her hand freezing on the bottle, eyes widening like she's seeing through time itself. We're standing yards apart but already inside each other's story somehow.
"Hi," she says, and laughs at the cosmic inadequacy of it.
"Hi," I manage back.
The world starts again but different. Her friends calling from the van—"Sasha, you coming?" The spell bends but doesn't break.
"I'm..." she gestures vaguely at me, at the space between us where something invisible hums.
"We're from the Land," she says. "Commune near Garberville. We're doing a medicine walk. Want to come?"
Already knowing I'll say yes. Already knowing this matters.
Walk to the van. Her friends—Melodie and Dave—barely look up from their preparations. Melodie's got flowers braided in her hair, humming something that sounds like Sanskrit. Dave's rolling joints with mechanical precision, his hands steady as a surgeon's.
"Another seeker," Melodie says, not really a question. "The forest keeps providing."
"Always does," Dave agrees, looking up to really see me for the first time. "You play that guitar or just carry it?"
"Both," I say.
"Good answer," he grins. "We'll need music later. The medicine likes music."
"I'm Sasha." Her eyes still doing that thing—seeing through to something essential.
"I'm—" and my name sounds strange, like it belongs to someone else.
"Doesn't matter," she says. "I know you."
We fall into step together. She knows every path, every tree. Pointing out the grandmother trees, the grandfather trees. The ones with caves burned in their bases where fires hollowed them out but didn't kill them.
"Fire's their friend," she explains. "Clears out the undergrowth. Makes room for new seedlings. The bark doesn't burn. Can't burn. Nature's asbestos."
Telling me about the commune. Forty people on sixty acres. Growing vegetables, raising goats. Tree planting in winter, trimming work in fall. Everything shared—work, food, sometimes lovers.
"I lead the morning dream circles," she adds. "We sit together at dawn, share what came through in sleep. The dreams teach us how to live together, how to work through conflicts before they poison the well. My gift is helping people remember and interpret what they've dreamed."
"We're trying to remember what humans forgot. How to belong to the land instead of owning it"
"You know what John Muir said?" she continues. "'The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.' But I think he was only half right. The forest isn't the way into the universe. It IS the universe. Just wearing tree clothes."
But I'm not listening to the words. I'm watching how she moves—like the trees taught her to walk. Something familiar in her gestures, the way she touches bark like it's skin. The way she stops mid-sentence to listen to something I can't hear yet.
And then it hits. "Holy shit. I know you."
She stops. "How?"
"At Penn, I took this film class with Rudy Burckhardt. All theory, never shot anything. But I wrote this script about a girl who could talk to trees. Really talk to them. Hear what they're thinking. I called her Sasha. She had this way of seeing the forest as conscious, alive..."
Her eyes go wide. "I've always felt that. Since I was little. Like they're trying to tell us something but we forgot how to listen. My parents thought I was crazy. Took me to doctors."
"What did the doctors say?"
"That I had an overactive imagination. That I'd grow out of it." She laughs. "Joke's on them. When I turned eighteen, I left their perfect suburb, their perfect expectations. Found others who could hear what I heard. The Land saved me from becoming what they wanted—some normal girl who'd forgotten how to listen to anything but human voices."
Melodie and Dave have drifted ahead, used to Sasha's tree communions. We find our own rhythm, slower, deeper. The forest closes around us like a green dream.
"So this script," she says. "What happened to Sasha?"
"Never got to finish it. Dropped out. But in my head, she was teaching people to hear the trees again. Starting a revolution of listening."
"I like that. A revolution of listening." She stops at a particularly massive redwood. "This one's my favorite. I call her the Mother. She's over two thousand years old. Imagine what she's seen."
She reaches into her woven bag. "Ready to really hear them?"
The peyote buttons look like ancient coins, brown and wrinkled. Dried flesh of the sacred cactus. She explains—earth medicine. From someone's Arizona connection, harvested with prayers and tobacco offerings.
"The indigenous people say it opens the heart. Lets you speak with the plant spirits."
We chew slowly. Bitter. Like eating concentrated earth. Everything you need to know in that taste—soil and rain and time and death and birth. The texture making me gag but she shows me how to breathe through it.
"The medicine's teaching you already. How to accept what's difficult."
Walking as we chew. She tells me more about the Land. How they bought it with pooled money from trust funds and drug deals. How they're learning to build with salvage lumber, to grow food without chemicals. The conflicts too—who works, who doesn't. The couples forming and breaking. The hard winter when half the commune left.
"But the ones who stayed, we're family now. Chosen family."
I tell her about my domineering father. The way he was always trying to position me like a chess piece, always trying to control my path, my dreams. About looking for something I can't name but recognize when I see it. Like now. Like her.
"You're looking for home," she says simply. "Not a place. A feeling."
Forty minutes. Forty-five. The first alerts—colors warming at the edges. That sense of something about to happen. Not the electric rush of acid—this is older, deeper. Like sinking into warm honey. The ground getting softer under my feet.
"Feel that?" Her hand finds mine. Natural as breathing.
The trees beginning to breathe. In. Out. We're inside something's lungs. The air getting thicker, visible. Golden motes floating like pollen, like stars.
She pulls me to the Mother tree, presses my palm against bark. "Feel her stories?"
And I do. The tree speaks through my palm—not in words but in pure knowing. First vision sliding in like memory:
Lightning crack. White-hot fork finding the crown three hundred years ago. The violence of it. The tree screaming in my hand. Sap boiling. Crown exploding. But then—survival. The slow work of healing. Bark growing over the wound. The scar still there, part of her story now.
Then fire. Walls of it sweeping through. The heat in my palm unbearable. Other trees falling, their death screams. But the Mother's bark doesn't burn. Cannot burn. She stands in the inferno untouched while everything dies around her. And after—the cleared ground. The ash nurturing new seedlings. Her children rising from catastrophe.
Wind storms. Hundred-year floods. Droughts that lasted decades. All of it absorbed, survived, transformed into growth.
"She's teaching you," Sasha whispers. "How to survive everything."
The coming-up inexorable now. Colors not Day-Glo acid intensity but soft pastels breathing into each other. Gold into green into rose into gold again. The air thick with spores of light. Every surface pulsing gently.
Walking deeper into the grove. Time folding. I'm seven in the Armonk woods, feeling safe for the last time. I'm seventeen writing about Sasha, not knowing I'm writing about my future. I'm now, here, holding a stranger's hand who isn't strange at all.
Melodie and Dave somewhere ahead, their laughter floating back like birdsong. But we're in our own world now. Sasha talking in fragments, her philosophy emerging:
"Bodies are just compost in motion... walking soil arrangements... everything's always becoming something else... the trees know this... they feed on their own fallen... nothing's ever lost, just transformed..."
Her words making perfect sense. Of course we're compost. Of course we're temporary. The relief of it.
The medicine peaking now. We find a fallen giant, soft with moss. Lying along its length, looking up at infinity fractalling into itself. The canopy so far above it might be the sky. Might be heaven. Branches creating geometries that shouldn't exist but do.
"Look," she says. "The trees are drawing sacred geometry. Teaching us about structure."
And I see it. Triangles becoming hexagons becoming spirals. The mathematics of growth visible. How branches divide following ancient ratios. The Fibonacci sequence written in wood.
Second vision coming stronger. The boundaries dissolving. Where do I end and the forest begin? My veins are root systems carrying nutrients. My lungs are leaves breathing for the world. My thoughts are the chemical messages trees send through fungal networks underground.
"We're not in the forest," one of us says. Maybe both. "We are the forest."
The knowing deeper than words. We ARE the forest dreaming it's human for a while. This body just borrowed carbon, walking around briefly before returning to soil. The ego dissolving like sugar in rain.
She's touching my face. Her fingers leaving trails of light. "Your face is everyone's face. Do you see? We're all the same being, wearing different masks."
Third vision softer, unexpected:
Not a memory but a feeling made visible. Warmth radiating from somewhere just beyond reach—golden, patient, eternal. The sensation of being held without being trapped. Laughter that includes rather than excludes. Hands passing food across a table where everyone has a place. The sound of many voices becoming one voice, not in uniformity but in harmony.
A kitchen where the door is always open. Steam rising from something cooking slow. The particular safety of being known—not performing, not proving, just existing. Children somewhere, their joy uncomplicated. Adults who remember how to play. Evening light that forgives everything.
The belonging so intense I can feel it in my chest like a second heartbeat. Understanding floods in—this is what I'm looking for. Not trying to repair what's broken behind me but finding what's whole ahead. Family that chose each other. Love that multiplies instead of divides. The home that exists wherever people decide to make it.
"You're crying," Sasha says gently.
Touching my face. Wet. "I saw home. What it could be."
"It already is. You just have to find it. Or make it."
We're lying intertwined but not sexual—more like we're growing into one organism. The earth breathing through us. Our bodies just arrangements of star stuff and soil, pretending to be separate. The illusion beautiful in its temporary nature.
She's telling me more about the Land. The morning circles where they share dreams. The work songs they sing in the gardens. The full moon gatherings where clothes come off and bodies merge in honest animal joy. How jealousy and possession are just fear.
"We're trying to love without owning. To touch without grasping."
The deepest part: understanding we're held. The planet itself conscious, cradling us. Every atom in our bodies forged in stars, on loan from the universe. Time not a line but a spiral—everything happening at once, has happened, will happen.
"I want to kiss you," I say. Or think. The boundary between thought and speech gone.
She receives it, but gently turns it into something else. A blessing maybe. Forehead to forehead, breathing synchronized. "I need to tell you something."
Already knowing. The medicine showed me. "You love women."
She laughs, surprised. "How did you—never mind. Yes. Does it matter?"
"No. It's perfect. You're Sasha. She was never meant to be possessed. Just witnessed."
"You really did write me, didn't you? Before you knew I existed."
"Or you dreamed me into finding you."
"Both," she says. "It's always both."
The coming down gentle as going up. The forest solidifying back into individual trees. But changed. Everything changed. Melodie and Dave materialize, also glowing. We walk back through grandfather trees that now feel like family.
At the van, she shows me their altar—crystals and feathers and bones. A photo of the commune, everyone naked and laughing. "You should visit. The Land would love you."
"Maybe I will."
But knowing I won't. Not yet. Still have miles to go before I'm ready for that kind of home.
They're heading further north. Crescent City, maybe Oregon. Can't take me south. That's perfect too. Everything exactly where it needs to be. She hugs me with her whole being. I smell the forest in her hair, the earth in her skin.
"Thank you for seeing me," she whispers.
"Thank you for being seen."
"Hey tree-talker," Dave calls. "You need anything? Food? Smoke?"
"I'm good."
"You're better than good," Sasha says. "You're awake."
Watching the van disappear into forest shadow. The stars and moons painted on its sides catching last light. Still soft from the medicine. Standing at the entrance to the grove, thumb out, but in no hurry. Let the right ride find me. Let the river of the road carry me where it will.
A few cars pass. Not ready yet. Need to let this settle. Walk back into the grove a little way. Sit with the Mother tree one more time.
"Thank you," I tell her. Meaning it.
The tree says nothing. Says everything. Just stands there, holding two thousand years of survival in her body. Teaching anyone who'll listen how to endure.
Finally, a pickup stops. Old man heading to Garberville. Perfect. Climbing in, guitar between my knees. He doesn't want to talk and neither do I. Just want to watch the forest flow past, carrying its medicine in my cells.
Still feeling the trees inside me. Their stories of survival, their fireproof wisdom. Somewhere behind me, Sasha's probably making camp, surrounded by her chosen family. Somewhere ahead, that golden window waits—not my grandmother's house but somewhere just as warm. A place where broken people make themselves whole again.
For now, just breathing with the planet. In. Out. Part of something so much bigger than any of us dream.
The trees know. They've always known.
Sasha found. Sasha released. The redwoods holding all of it in their ancient memory.
Just like she said they would.
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Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
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This is Chapter 8 of 16 in my complete 1973 hitchhiking memoir.
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