Chapter 0

Prologue

We locked the car and then took a good look around. Here we were at twelve-thousand five hundred feet, stepping out onto the gravel, a small pullout, a minimalist parking lot, if you could call it that.

There was virtually nothing here but small alpine plants and lots and lots of rocks. It looked like the Scottish Highlands, but that place was on the other side of the globe.

The air was cool, and the sky- what parts of it that we could see through the heavy clouds- was a perfect  and flawless cobalt blue. There were no birds, because there were no trees up here.

I had never taken any one of my student to this place before, so I knew Bobby was in for an extraordinary experience, although I could not predict what that would be. This place was mystery personified.

We were very nearly completely removed from our every day life. We were so very far from the energies and influences that effectively contaminate the consciousness of everyone who is in the middle of that madness we call “civilization”.

 Remarkably, we were barely an hour’s drive from the metropolitan area that we lived in. We looked east, and we could see the sprawling city far, far below us through a humid haze, as if we were looking down on earth from outer space, a gaseous cloud of cosmic vapor between us and the rest of the universe.

“This is amazing,” Bobby said. “This is like another world.”

And we hadn’t even walked away from the car yet.

I went around to the hatchback and opened it.

“Take a Wand,” I said. “Do you want the cane or the umbrella?”

Bobby looked up. “Hmmm. Looks like it might rain. I’ll take the umbrella.”

 “Good choice,” I said as I handed him this unusual and rare wangee handled tool. This was among my favorite Wands, and I was certain he would pick up something good with it, especially up here. The signals were exceptionally clear in this area and I was certain it would afford him access to information that he would never be able to get otherwise.

. That the umbrella might keep him dry if necessary was almost entirely beside the point.

I took the Chinese Sword Cane for myself. I was actually relieved, because I frankly didn’t think he had enough experience to use it yet. He was still pretty green and he might end up putting a hole in his foot or worse, even though the sword was for the moment safely sheathed inside the barrel of the cane.

The whole purpose of our expedition was to cement in Bobby’s mind the experience for himself- that he was surrounded by unusual tools, tools that everyone else took for granted as being nothing special at all.

It was my hope that he would at last see that these very tools could open doors for him, that these tools could launch him far from his common experience into other worlds that otherwise only seemed a dream. It was my hope that the two Wands we had brought with us would reveal their potential up here in a manner that he could no longer deny as nothing more than my fertile imagination.

Nearly everyone else on the planet thought that Wands were nothing more than make believe. Nearly everyone else on the planet thought I was out of my mind when I talked of such things.

We removed our things from the back of the car and I shut the hatchback.

I pulled my backpack on and began to walk on the almost imperceptible dirt trail that wound away from the car park towards the spine of the peak that lay in the short distance in front of us, perhaps an eighth of a mile up the path.

“Follow me, the best is ahead of us. You haven’t seen anything yet,” I suggested.

 Suddenly something caught the toe of my foot. “ACK!!” Not six feet from the car I stubbed my toe on a rock that was jutting out from the trail and I barely kept my balance. “Ooo, ouch!!” I stopped and rubbed my toe grimacing, wobbling on the on the un-stubbed leg.

“Hahah!” Bobby laughed. “Oh man, it can’t get any better than that! How long have you been giving these guided tours?  Hahahha!... OWWUUPP!!!” Bobby was so busy laughing at me he stumbled on the very same rock himself, did a jumbled and twisted clown ballet pirouette, and then fell flat with a big thump on his rear end.

“Hahaha!” Now it was my turn to chuckle, and my sore toe completely stopped hurting.

“Shuddup…” he said, embarrassed as he pushed himself up and dusted off his pants.

“People who live in housed glasses shouldn’t stow thrones,” I commented.

“What?” Bobby said as he picked a couple pieces of imbedded gravel out of his palms.

“Forget it, “ I smiled. “You okay?”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Niles.”

I was more than three times the age of my young teenage guitar student, my Traveling protégé. I had been to this place many dozens of times over the preceding decade. I knew the landscape as well as my own urban back yard. But the place still retained secrets from me, even in the many spots that I was more than intimately familiar with. I never tired of exploring every nook and cranny up on this mountain.

There was no sound at all. We had driven up the long winding road off the main two-laned highway for several miles and had not seen another single vehicle of any type. Although the road commonly had cars traveling this scenic vista during the weekend, I had purposefully chosen a weekday for this trip.

We certainly would not run into anyone off the road and where we were going, on the edge of the rocky cliffs where we were headed. We might see a pica, or a crow, but I expected few other moving creatures save a bug here or there.

We had walked several hundred yards from the car and quite a vertical distance in elevation higher up. Our vehicle now looked like a matchbox sized toy car a couple far below us.

We zig-zagged the most crooked indirect path winding higher and higher, between boulders ever increasing in size. The wildflowers were at their peak and surrounded us.

“Look at this!” Bobby exclaimed with surprise. “These flowers, this is incredible! They’re huge, they’re absolutely huge!”

I turned around and looked at him slightly puzzled. “Huh?” I didn’t understand. They were just regular wildflowers.

Bobby held up a picked purple stem in right in front of his one opened eye, blocking his vision. “Niles, look! This flower is actually bigger than your car!”

I smiled for a second, then understood the joke. “Hey! You’re not supposed to pick the flowers up here. It’s a reserve.” I frowned slightly and shook my head in motherly disapproval.

“Oh, sorry.” Bobby knelt down and made like he was trying to replant the flower back in the ground. He was mocking me, in a good natured way, as was his habit. It was actually absurdly funny.

“Forget it. Just don’t pick any more. If everybody who came up here picked one flower, in ten thousand years there wouldn’t be any left,” I lectured. “And don’t let the rangers catch you.”

The reality was, however, it actually was prohibited to pick anything up in this wilderness. Tourists had already created significant damage to the ancient forest that lay a half mile downhill from where we walked.

This place contained some of the oldest trees on the entire planet, Bristlecone Pines, the oldest living things on earth. We walked a mere quarter mile above them, and could see the ghost like angled dark branches of this enchanted forest peeking through the ground fog below us. Any moment I expected to see goblins run out from behind one of the nearby truck sized boulders we passed, and dash off into the dark woods below.

Before the area was protected by law, tourists had regularly picked up and taken away gorgeous pieces of ancient dead wood that was a irreplaceable part of this natural environment. Close to the road itself where people drove to access this area, the ground was nearly as bare as a beach.

But up where we were hiking the story was different. Although at this spot, we were above tree line itself which we could see several hundred feet below us. At the place where the forest came close up the hill nearer to where we were, it was too far for lazy flat-landers who had little respect for this place to hike. This further uphill end of the enchanted forest remained pristine and whole and unspoiled- and unpicked.

There was an incredible abundance of wild flowers everywhere. There were Purple Sparklers that looked like violet fireworks shooting off of a green rocket trail, with gold bursts in the center of each brilliant blossom. There were snow stars hugging the ground, no more than a quarter inch across each, as delicate as fairy footprints. There were football field sized patches of Indian Paintbrush here and there, in an infinite variety of subtle shades of ruby, scarlet, and orange. And then there were the Giant Pluto Heads, big green round balls of spikes that truly looked like they belonged at the bottom of an extraterrestrial ocean.

It was impossible not to stare at our feet as we climbed higher and higher towards the crest of the peak in front of us, as the ground was an unbelievably psychedelic and detailed landscape of multi-colored pebbles, plants, and moss.

Bobby came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. “This is like being stoned,” he remarked. “And all I had for lunch was peanut butter.”

I smiled, but didn’t say anything. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

In the city, you would not think twice about such patterns under your feet. You would think such simple things as small plants and stones were entirely unremarkable. But up here in this rarified environment, something instantly clicked in your brain: You became super sensitive to subtle variations of texture and color that struck you as entirely magnificent. It could be compared to taking a powerful shamanic stimulant or magical herb, but here, the drug was this special place itself.

We began to reach the top of one crest and had long lost sight of the parking area. As we rounded a small outcropping we stopped and took in a view that was nothing short of breathtaking, literally.

“Hold on a minute,” Bobby said. “I’m outta breath!” He bent down with his hands on his knees.

“Wimp,” I said. “I’m a Capricorn, a mountain goat. What are you, a Pisces?”

“Shut up. I’m a Capricorn too, January 7^th. I’m just not used to this.”

“Too much pasta.” I retorted. I hadn’t named him Bobby Spaghetti for nothing.

“You’re suppose to carb up when you go on a hike, don’t you know,” Bobby replied.

I chucked to myself. Here was a young teenager, and he was having trouble keeping up with me, an old fart. Of course, I didn’t dare mention that my thighs were already aching from the very steep leg of the trail we had just come up. I was actually glad he wanted to rest.

“Look at that,” I pointed out the range of snowcapped razor sharp peaks immediately across the valley to the west.

Bobby straightened up and turned around to look. “Oh my god,” he said nearly under his breath. “That’s incredible.”

We were looking at not one, but several over fourteen-thousand peaks all within eyeshot from this vantage point. The very peak of Mt. Evans was just mere miles from where we stood. Gray and Torries’ twin fourteeners were a short distance west. Long’s peak was up range perhaps twenty five miles. And then Pike’s Peak was a relatively far fifty miles sound of where we stood. But we could see the all with an easy twist of our necks.

“Let’s keep going, there’s a power spot just over there,” I suggested and pointed a short distance away.

We hiked down a bit from this one high spot, hopping from the top of one flat boulder to the next, but still staying more or less on the crest of the spine of this peak we were exploring. To our immediate right, eastward, the peak dropped sharply down, forming a wall of granite bluffs that ended a couple hundred feet below us leading to the dense Bristlecone forest. To our left, the side of the mountain we traversed was a more or less gradual descent that eventually led to a long deep valley. We made our way along this side of the peak, continually working our way higher and higher.

After another ten minutes of hiking up and down on this rocky roller coaster, we came to an unexpectedly flat area just below the edge of the ridge.

“This is it,” I said as I took off my back pack and sat down on the ground to get out a bottle of water. “You want some?”

I handed Bobby the aluminum water bottle after taking a good long swig myself.

“Shortstop,” he said.

I smiled. I had heard my father say that to me when I was a kid, and used the salt before passing it on. I wondered if my father’s spirit was following us that afternoon.

Bobby walked over to a solid wall of rock that sat on one side of this flat area. “Wow, I didn’t expect this up here,” he said as he ran his hand against the wall.

It was as if we had suddenly stumbled upon a big outdoor movie screen that had been carved out of the side of the mountain. I had been to this place many times, but for Bobby, it must have been quite something to encounter for the first time.

“This is, awesome,” he said examining the twenty foot vertical wall of rock. Directly in front of the wall was a living room size of flat ground, big enough to hold a modest wedding reception or bar mitzvah.

There was a small ledge about three feet off the ground at the base of this wall. I watched carefully as Bobby contemplated the spot with his back towards me. He threw his own backpack and the umbrella on the ground. Then he spotted the ledge and placed one foot on it, as if to test that it was not loose rock.

It was as if instinct took over, and he dug his fingernails into the rock face and then hoisted himself wholly onto the lip. He flattened himself against the wall, hugging it, with his ear to it as if he was listening to something deep inside the earth.

Looking at him, flat against this rock cliff, it made the most incongruous sight. Here he was standing vertically against this nearly perfectly flat  area of rock, a wall perhaps twenty five feet across and twenty feet high, and yet from my vantage point, it looked exactly as if he were lying down on a granite bed, horizontally. It was a remarkable illusion.

He closed his eyes.

There was no sound at all, no wind, no birds, nothing.

And then we heard in the distance, from the direction of from the forest of twisted fifteen-hundred year old pine trees far below us, as sound as sudden as a crack of thunder piercing the clouds high above us, a sound that sent a bolt of pure electrical shock up our spines.

Bobby was catapulted off the wall no different than if the wall itself had suddenly come to life and knocked him off with the force of a heavy weight boxer.

We had both heard the unmistakable sustained sound of a woman screaming at the top of her lungs, as if she was seconds away from her own murder.

“Get up!” I yelled, as I stood up my cane in my hand held out at arm length.” Grab your Wand! Now!”

Chapter 1

Niles Abercrumby

I met Frank Zappa one Denver summer night in 1973. My high school buddy Scott Lindenbaum and I snuck into the KFML radio station office building before one of Frank’s concerts while he was giving a pre-concert interview. Frank was polite and cordial, and he gave me this single bit of advice along with his ball point pen autograph on the outside of my electric utility bill envelope, the only scrap of paper I  had at hand at the moment:

“Remember you are employed, and working for the muse.”

My name is Niles Abercrumby.

I’ve taught over thirty thousand music lessons in my life to an uncounted number of pupils, with a few students thrown in. Very few.

I’ve taught an even select fewer of those to use Wands.

I am a university trained musician, with a teaching certificate in Music Education from the state of Colorado, United States of America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe 14RCB Sector 42, Reality Phase 9. I earned this certificate many, many years ago.

I’ve long outgrown it, and I let it expire and die of natural causes five short years after it arrived in my mail box. It came in a big white envelope packed along with my diploma as well as an application for car insurance. 

My teaching certificate and college diploma were mailed to me since I had not received such documents ceremoniously in person with a handshake, wearing the traditional cap and gown. Nor had I less ceremoniously obtained it either, as conceivably wearing mere plain jeans and sneakers with holes in each, slid through the opening of a bullet proof teller window inside the administration office building by a smiling cherubic clerk with a Hispanic surname.

I opted for the much more informal US Postal Mail delivery. Less walking for me, same end result without all the pomp and pageantry. I’m not big on ceremony.

In college I learned how to play every band instrument John Phillips Sousa wrote an arrangement for. I also as learned how to toot and pluck on every instrument used in a modern day symphonic orchestra, those instruments that I already had not taught myself to play out of curiosity growing up. I was always very interested in music and doing things with my hands, but I was never interested in institutions or tradition per se.

In is no coincidence that the same dexterity applied to instruments helps in the channeling of energy through an assortment of Wands. However, there is presently no college course in Wands, nor is there any diploma associated with this skill. I earned my extra curricular skill without documentation or accreditation. I learned the How-To of Wands directly from studying the only real source of literature I know of on the subject, and from trial and error.

As I’ve come to learn, Wand technique greatly relies on underlying Fun-di-Mental principals that I learned from the one person who was responsible for allowing me to get my hands on a copy of such a textbook on the subject of Wands. This person, almost certainly a Wand practitioner himself during his life, was considered by the general public as wildly eccentric at the very least if not outright out of his mind.

Indeed, my first direct knowledge of Wands and how they work came as a result of spending an awful lot of time with a fellow that most people thought was a crazy old guy living in a shack up in the mountains.

High up in a remote forest near the Colorado Continental Divide lived and worked the founder and director of The Dormant Brain Research and Development Laboratory, D.A.T. Stingo, or as we called him, DaStingo, or even simpler, Stingo.

I’ve always found that a person’s name reveals something about their character, and this seems to be the case with everyone that’s played a significant role in this story.

In his case, Stingo was a tough professor and teacher. He didn’t mess around. He could give you the most powerful injection of truth and wisdom of anyone I ever met, a huge shot of inspiration and energy. But he also had a sharp bite if you made the fatal mistake of taking him for a fool. You could get stung badly, and you wouldn’t forget..

Up until now, his involvement with Wands has remained a complete secret to nearly every one of the students and subjects who passed through the stone gate to this pristine wilderness facility. In all respects it was already a place off the most un-beaten track. For him to further admit to utilizing Wands would have pushed his already teetering reputation even further off center and completely off the precipice of logical acceptance.

Had Stingo revealed his interested and knowledge, much less a use of Wands, he would have certainly been considered a complete lunatic by all, including his most ardent supporters. Thus, it went unadvertised to his grave.

The main work of Stingo’s behavior lab was teaching people the ins and outs of how their mind motor worked, learned in the atmosphere of nature unspoiled.

You see, Stingo wanted to save the world, one person at a time.

He felt that the world was a mess because most people had a mess of a brain. Multiply a messy brain by billions of brain owners, and you get a messy and doomed planet.

If you can save one brain, that brain can save another. “Each one, teach one,” he would say. And that could become a geometric progression. “Save one soul, and you save the universe,” an ancient script said.

My self-imposed job was to see if I could save myself for a start.

If you managed to hear about and to actually find The Dormant Brain lab and its director-caretaker, you might sign up for a six-week Brain In Nature Course. You would camp out for weeks on end, sleep on hard stone covered ground in your self-made lean to shelter, and at the end of the summer you would have enough knowledge of how the human brain works to teach a university crash course on the subject.

Then you would go home.

To all of the hundreds of people who found their way to this back woods institute and completed the course, brain training would remain their only impression of what Stingo and his place was all about.

But quite out of view, hidden far off the main trail proper was a key to tools that would surely land anyone locked admission into the funny farm if they dared speak of it in public. It was here where I first learned of The Book of Wands.

Surely, no other former participants at the brain lab will confirm what I am about to reveal, mainly because they weren’t in on this most secretive of Stingo’s secrets. They all split once they got from him what they wanted and what they expected to get.

“Once a student pops his frontal lobes,” Stingo often remarked, “I never seem ‘em again.”

I hung around years after everyone else had gone home to feed their fish. As it turned out, something else turned up on the end of my line.

During his life Stingo did not want to jeopardize the rest of his work and his already counter-culture reputation by even wilder claims now set forth in my own account here. I can afford such a personal risk as I already have a steady and permanent income selling thousands of battery operated pet nail trimmers on eBay each month under a completely different name.

So let us proceed.

Chapter 2

The Niles Abercrumby

School of Music

And Other Stuff

My Wand exposure and education began as early as I can remember, although I didn’t realize nor was I told that I was obtaining such instruction indirectly or otherwise until far later on. I think more than a few people use Wands, but clearly very few if any don’t know consciously what they are doing, but rather do so instinctually.

Using a Wand as a Wand is almost universally unadvertised as such. Understandably, claims one would make of such an activity would lead others to the perception that one has lost all his marbles.

I refused to go to my university graduation, held early one summer Saturday morning, because I felt that achieving my higher education had already robbed enough of my personal time. I had already missed hundreds of hours of early weekend Bugs Bunny cartoons during my youth because of Saturday morning religious school that my parents forced me to attend. Enough was enough already.

Speaking of religious school, I have never been particularly interested in religion either, with the possible exception of Taoism, and that is clearly a pretty feeble excuse for an institutional belief system, but about as close to religion as I will ever voluntarily w ander.

You know what those Taoists say: “The Way is not hard for those who have no preferences.”

Well now, that’s what I call religion.

When I graduated from college, I immediately took a position as a substitute teacher in the Denver Public Schools. This lasted for exactly one semester before I completely dropped out of classroom teaching. I had begun drinking a half gallon of coffee a day just to stay awake in class from the lack of creative stimulation inside my own head. I drank other potions to calm me down both on the way home and additionally after arriving home.  My nerves were ritually being fried by junior high schoolers bouncing off the walls inside the hallowed and revered walled institution known as School.

Being that necessity is the mother of invention (and more on those Mothers later), and that my own survival seemed very necessary to me, I soon learned that I could make a perfectly comfortable living inventing my own school, teaching music one person at a time at in-home private music lessons.

Thus, The Niles Abercrumby School of Music, Art and Other Stuff helped me to dodge brain atrophy and/or putting my nervous system at possible fatal risk from over-exposure to large numbers of wildly enthusiastic elementary, middle, and high school pupils.

Not that such public school classrooms are filled so much with students wildly enthusiastic about music, but more accurately are typically filled with pupils enthusiastic about being wild.

Speaking of students and pupils, one thing I do remember from my own middle school training, or at very least I continue to hallucinate, is that the difference between a pupil and a student is that a student studies, and a pupil simply watches.

It is easy to remember the differences between these two if you remember that a pupil is nothing but a hole that sucks in light.

The same classroom may be filled with thirty or more pairs of pupils, but may easily and simultaneously have zero students in it.

As I’ve said, necessity is the mother of invention, and so for me, it was necessary to make a living with music without losing my mind. I do, however, continue to be accused of already having met that fate. So it goes.

Speaking of mother, when I was in the sixth grade I earned my first few dollars self-employed walking door to door in my neighborhood selling my own original pastel sketches. This was indeed chalk Wands at work making dollars in this most innocent manner.

I shocked my mother- herself a school teacher- when she found out how I had spent my afternoon mixing adolescent capitalism with crayons.

My mother is now 84, and she still can’t believe (nor does she approve) that I actually make my living as a self-employed artist of any type.

Like I said, I let my teaching certificate expire because I never again wanted to voluntarily or otherwise set foot in a band room after an indoor winter and spring spent trying to wrestle order out of hundreds of entropy intent adolescent and younger bi-pedal hominids wielding drums, cymbals, horns, loud reed instruments, catgut strung boxes, and other “civilized” instruments of cacophony.

I continue to get my car insurance through my college, however, so my college education was not entirely wasted.

My mother had tried her best to sculpt me in her own image as a dedicated public school servant, but it was ultimately an exercise in futility for her part. My heart had been guided by another “Mother” throughout my teenage years:

I had grown up listening to the decadent and rebellious strains of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, as well as giving equal time listening and studying Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. These were Dadaists with a tune.

Years after I had fled the public schools, Mom had still tried to convince me to keep my school teaching certificate valid and convinced me to enroll in a teaching certificate renewal program, “You’ll never know when you’ll want to teach in the schools again!”

I temporarily succumbed, and as I sat in the Colorado Teaching Certificate Renewal Study Seminar held at the Stapleton Airport Sheridan Hotel Conference Center, my mind kept drifting back to strains of Zappa compositions such as, “Who Are The Brain Police?”, and “You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here”.

At the lunch break, sitting in a large cafeteria with a hundred or so noisy soon to be re-certified re-fried public servants, I pondered my future in a just emptied vanilla pudding cup that was part of our collective lunch break. I wondered how many more pudding cups I would stare into in how many more noisy lunchroom cafeterias in the years to come. I took a quick deep breath and silently made a break for my car out in the parking lot and forever away from re-certification as if I were escaping from a penitentiary and a life sentence. I never looked back.

My resourcefulness in creating a career for myself as a private music teacher has had many distinct advantages over being employed by the state, not the least of which is that I get to stay home all day long and spend quality time with my dogs, Erfie and Chloe, and practice with my sticks, Wands, and other useful tools of Travel.

Erfie and Chloe are sleeping next to me on the couch right now as I write this.

Yes indeed, you are now ingesting the thoughts of a person who while transcribing this, at his particular longitude, latitude, and other dimensions and coordinates of time, space, and abstract thought, is sitting on a comfy three cushioned sofa with semi-abstract southwestern Native American inspired geometrical designs imprinted on the fabric covering. Self-determination also allows this person to type at his own whim, day or night, with nary a care of waking up in time to join the mad rat race at seven A.M.

Next to him are two snoring, dog dreaming twin sibling West Highland White Terriers, each in their own, or perhaps intersecting other worldly dog dreamy universes. They never dropped out of the rat race because they never joined it to begin with.

They have, contrary, chased smaller cute mice across the kitchen floor, fortunately because my home has largely been rat free, albeit not free of their smaller cousins.

I hesitate to inform them that they have never caught a single mouse.

Wait!

I take that back.

One of them had actually deposited a big fat gray mouse at the foot of my bed a couple of months ago. That’s probably why this particular rodent got caught in the first place- too chubby to run away fast enough.

Anyway, Erfie is the big brother, Chloe the little sister.

As I engage in interspecies telecommunication, CLICKING FORWARD and ON, I perceive the internal and non-corporal activities inside these somewhat smaller canine craniums:

Erfie, dreaming of a giant bowl, a white ceramic bowl decorated with colorful yellow flowers and blueberry and strawberry designs. It overflows with endless crunchy peanut butter and molasses doggy cookies.

Crunch crunch crunch.

Chloe, running through a wonderfully green hilly meadow, sun shining, birds twerping, butterflies dancing, clouds drifting, dandelion puffs riding on the wind. She runs to the top of the hill, wagging her tail- and at the top of a hill she comes upon a giant bowl of endless crunchy peanut butter and molasses doggy cookies.

Crunch crunch crunch.

I have no doubt at all who is the more intelligent of creatures, between humans and canines.

Despite the greater relative volume of the human brain, I humbly bow at the simple wisdom and generosity of my furry family members. Less is far more.

CONTINUED IN THE FULL BOOK!