A Story: The Canyon Is A Magic Place

There’s something magic about The Canyon.

No, really: I saw it with my own eyes…or did I?

It happened about 15 years ago…or did it?

As a single parent I always found ways to entertain my son that were free, inexpensive and local. As an environmental enthusiast and Big T “local” it was a perfect setting to take my growing son every week of his young life to Big Tujunga Canyon (The Canyon for short). We hiked, gathered natural ‘treasures’, swam in the pools and waterfalls and loved The Canyon like it was our own back yard. But we never saw anything in our yard to equal what we witnessed in The Canyon.

There’s an outcrop of rock just past the intersection of Big T Canyon Road and The 2 Highway, before the dam overlook. We always called it The Flattop. It had a forest rangers station at one time, years ago. It stretches a rocky peninsula of stone way out into The Canyon’s natural crevasse. One of The Canyon’s purging fires wiped the station out and all that remains is the concrete foundation, stone planters and a series of flat levels that were bunkers, a helicopter pad and unpaved parking in better days; a deeply rutted road wends its way up to the top of the precipice. Winding and treacherous trails snake in broken pathways down the cliffsides and end in concrete outlooks. It is a glorious place to explore! My son Adam and I discovered that helicopter student pilots learn to fly up The Canyon, hover over Flattop and often land there. Perfect for a young boy to see!

So one weekday afternoon we packed a lunch and set out for Flattop. I nearly chose another destination for variety as we had just been there the day before…We parked in the little turnout across the road from Flattop. From the moment we got out of the car I knew something was different. It was so quiet it was like the sound had been turned off and all the natural things: birds chittering, winds sighing, ground squirrels scampering in the underbrush, were utterly absent. Silence loomed like a physical presence. I shook it off as my imagination and we hiked up the road to Flattop.

At the very first level I had planned to stop and cut ancient rosemary to weave into a wreath for my kitchen. I had my clippers at the ready but when we came to the flat area that stretched like an optical illusion into a sheer drop off, I crouched instinctively with clippers held like a weapon before me and drew my child behind me for protection…

Before me was an intricate Celtic Circle: a series of concentric circular pathways that covered the entire (every square foot) rocky shelf for a diameter of about 3500 square feet! It was made of hundreds of river stones, each the same smooth texture and the sizes grew progressively and minutely smaller as they marched inward. They had to have been brought to the site as all the stones on the precipice are angular not smooth. The pathway led ever inward to the center where a small barren tree had been planted and little objects hung from its branches. The entire Flattop had been swept smooth where the Celtic Circle was. Without thinking I began to walk the pathway, then caught myself and stopped in amazement at what I beheld and my acceptance of it; but that wasn’t all...

It felt as though we were being watched, like we’d surprised someone walking the circle and I imagined they had scurried for cover in the underbrush or might be hiding on the cliffside trails. As I cast my eyes about me looking for anything else not ‘right’, my gaze came to a complete shocked halt at an impossible sight (more so even than anything I had beheld so far).

There on the very point of the precipice was an immense and perfectly detailed 20 foot tall Wicker Man! As a person of UK heritage (and a nice mix of it) I can say my affinity for all things of that faraway land appeal to me in a deeply satisfying way… but this creation made my skin prickle and every hair stand up. It was shockingly ugly. It was both male and female with long branches of hair and skeletal limbs and enormous hollow abdomen. I believe it was not a good thing, yet how can I call such a mystery: evil? It was made entirely of branches; mud held it together and formed genitalia (both sexes) and it pointed one long arm with the index finger extended like a knobby hand down toward The Canyon in the direction I had come and directly in line with the setting sun. It was plainly spiritual and none of this had been there when we were, just the day before. 

Then, as only small boys can do, my son marched over to the circle, and before I realized what he was doing, he pried a stone from its place and flung it out over the cliff. I never heard it hit for the instant he threw it, it seemed as though a door had opened and all the sound that had been stored there came at me at once! It was a cacophony of noise: birds, winds, falling rocks and something else I cannot say… but very like a voice. I'd like to say I searched for it on the hillside but in truth our bodies moved of their own accord!

Our feet only touched the ground to take off and it seemed we made it back to the car in one long stride. Neither of us spoke all the drive home but when I got there my son said “no one will believe us” so I ran inside the house for the camera and he was still in shock in the car when I returned. We drove all the way back up to Flattop in record time.

It was gone. No… it was like it had never been. Even in the deepening dusk I could see every single stone was gone, not piled to the side but entirely absent. Not a twig or bit of mud remained of the Wicker Man and it was not thrown over the precipice. The tree was gone and every thing on it. The area had bits of debris natural to the setting strewn back in place. But our footprints from our earlier visit were also gone…

There was nothing to take a picture of.

Only our memory of the day remains…

The Canyon is a magic place.

Terre Ashmore © 2011

Butterflies in Yucatan

And now: a brief intermission while I research several new articles. Here is a story of another time and place in the interim...

Butterflies in Yucatan: 12/84

In Yucatan I chased my soul. I don’t know when it left me. I was touring pyramids on my honeymoon with a man I never knew. I was in agony, wondering if I’d chosen the wrong mate. I wanted to escape more than my vows… I wanted to leave behind all falsehood and find something true.

At Uxmal I broke my restraints to the Tour Group of Bermuda Shorts. They were glad to see me go, we also were unequally yoked. As they walked faster to avoid being paired with me, I began to fall back from them and veer off the Assigned Path. No one noticed or objected; the native tour guide looked right through me and turned his back as though to say ‘I knew you’d go’. My rehearsed litany of complaint went unsung. My ‘husband’ was entranced by a pair of voracious twins from Nooyauk. I hoped they’d take him home with them.

I don’t remember when it began, there seemed a shift in time and place. I was struggling defiantly up the stones toward an opening in the wall that was not solidly repaired; I could see inviting plants and flowers through the opening. There appeared to be a trail, so I followed it down the other side and away from the pyramid. A sense of timelessness fell upon me. Something enveloped me and was so familiar I mistook it for my self. Music began to play softly like my breath and being; I followed it like one entranced. Nothing in this life could have deterred me.

I’d been listening to the music for a while before I heard it. It called and beckoned over here now there. It swelled and receded like wind in the trees, though all was still. It was a lover’s voice: the pipes of Pan, I heard it clearly now and so loud I feared I’d have to share it with the others. It had no single source so I became lost in my wild pursuit of it.

I had left the group, the restored path and public pyramids, the tour, the guide, the civilized side of the ruins and climbed over the top of the sun bleached stones to plunge with abandon into the raw and untamed jungle.

Then I saw the butterflies. At first there were only a few: maize then azure then emerald petals floating lazily above the deep green; blooms I was sure were orchids became butterflies at my touch and joined the others in an erotic dance. I reached for them and they waited till I was about to touch them then danced down a trail and led me on, ever on.

They swirled in a whirlwind of tempo, in time with the rise and fall of sound. I also danced to their tune, stepping forward over fern and fall to reach for blooms that rose and flickered like bright flames through my hands only to flutter and descend a few steps farther in the forest and gather like an unthinkable bouquet of sun drenched blooms at a puddle on the forest floor.

A few became a hundred. I could hear their wings. They pulsed with sound. I thought if I could just touch them and encircle them with my arms when they rose in flight, something wonderful would happen. I followed the butterflies and music into another world. We came to a glen where all the butterflies of the forest seemed to have gathered. They encircled a small pond and vied for positions around the water’s edge. They mated and flew up in waves like confetti. The air was filled with them. The music swelled and increased, until it seemed a crescendo was about to crash down upon us all.

Suddenly the music stopped. The butterflies flew up into the trees and disappeared from view. The sound of silence swelled until it was shattered by an animal scream. It was not mine… Something was watching me through the tree trunks. Fear gripped my heart and I ran for my life.

I was disoriented, I was lost. I had traveled a half mile into the jungle. I ran this way then that and the thing that watched me followed. When I ran it ran; when I stopped it stopped. It never closed in, it paced me on a parallel path then it began driving me back to the pyramid.

When I was in sight of the pyramid I stopped to catch my breath and look for the opening in the stones I had come through. It was gone. I was on the outside, looking in. I was below a rocky rise upon which sits the long building called the Nunnery. Everything on my side was in sharp contrast to the buildings as I had left them. All was in an advanced state of ruin and decay; it felt like I had been gone for centuries.

Looking up at the Nunnery, I could see open doorways at regular intervals in the decaying stone walls. I labored to climb the rise to the nearest one. A few feet from the threshold I rose to look at my goal and, as though I was expected a heavily armed soldier swung into view deliberately blocking my way and in one graceful move swung his rifle from his shoulder to his chest and prepared to cock it. I could not see his eyes behind dark glasses but there was no intellect in his stance. I stumbled back down the rubble and climbed to the next doorway, thinking “damned socialists! They don’t know who I am.”

In perfect syncopation, an identical soldier swung into position in that doorway too. There were two more doors and two more soldiers. I sat at the bottom of the un-restored side of the ruins and stared at these four identical opponents who held their rifles across their chest, stood in blockade form and stared at the horizon over my head. I had no doubt there was a fifth and final one in the last door.

The thing in the jungle began to growl and worry like a dog with a bone, the music was stilled and no other sounds replaced it, a few butterflies were scattered about me on my rocky refuge, they were tattered now and dancing their last; reaching with ruined wings for the remains of life.

I made a mad dash for all I was worth up the rubble, along the berm, past the fifth doorway, without a glance, and around the end of the building to the carefully landscaped and paved parking lot in front of the pyramids. There my tour group was calmly waiting at the bus. I was hot, winded, scratched and bleeding. No one said a word or even thought it. I went to the end of the line.

As we waited for the guide to sign paperwork with the office, I could hear the distant strains of panpipes. No one else noticed.

The tour guide opened the bus door; sunburned tourists filed wearily in, talking colorlessly about the things they’d seen. I was last. (After all, I’d just run there from another place and time, and almost didn’t make it.)

The tour guide stopped me at the door, looked at me a long time then asked “are you married to that man?” I said yes. He had eyes the color of ice in a face burnt black by the sun under a brow like a bird of prey’s. I’d heard he was a mixed breed, unaccepted by Aztec and Mayan alike but able to speak many tongues and a guide for cultures who’d disowned him. I didn’t feel inclined to tell him what happened.

“He never asked where you went” my guide said.

“There were butterflies” I answered foolishly.

“I know.” The sunset was sliding slowly down the triangle of the pyramid, we waited for it to finish its journey; then he said, “He’s not the man for you.”

“I know,” and since I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes I got on the bus.

© Terre Ashmore 2009

Postscript: years later I saw a little Indy film called ‘El Norte’ the music and dancing butterflies are symbolic in that native culture for death and rebirth.