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By Bill Gann
Walt Bickel was a Christian, but he always spoke with a particular reverence about the sacredness of Black Mountain. I misinterpreted his respect for Native American beliefs, and always expected I might find some sort of strange magic radiating from the peak. I was young and foolish them.
One time, I felt sure the magic of the mountain was calling me. I had hiked with my cameras to the end of Sandy’s Mesa, and spent the night under the spring stars. In the morning I heard a strange wailing call from the top of the mountain. I grabbed a telephoto lens and studied the mountain to see what caused the bizarre crying voices. I found the sound came from an undulating brown cloud that seemed to move over the peak like an ameba. Adding doublers to my lens, made me laugh when a flock of sheep came into focus.
Another time while hiking down Black Mountain, a plant along the trail started a strange shaking dance. There was no wind and all the other plants were still, as if watching the performance. Until I figured out that some sort of underground rodent was eating the plant’s roots from below, I was sure strange spirits were trying to communicate secret wonders.
There was one time, the time I’d like to tell about here, where I may well have found what one goes seeking on mountaintops. I may have had a supernatural experience of mystical wonder, or I maybe I simply found myself.
I was with two friends, Eric Standring,and a person I'll call The Marine for reasons I'll explain later. Eric had just turned 18 and The Marine was a teacher I worked with in Fullerton. We were practicing desert survival. This was part of a wild-crafting hobby I was taking a bit too seriously back then. The plan was to hunt, trap, and gather our food. This seemed like a good idea at the time, except we chose a foolish time of year, winter, to live off the desert land. Game was scarce, and the only eatable plants I could identify were Mormon Tea and dried Desert Cabbage.
Desert Cabbage, in fact, was the plant I had once seen dance while a rodent ate it from below ground. It’s also called Desert Candle and has a wonderful flavor in the spring. In the winter it tastes like hay. Mormon Tea is simply a pine needle like bush that I now know gives one a dose of the drug ephedrine. The ephedrine, I suppose has limited nutritional value, but may account for strange happenings on this trek.
In four days, all we were able to catch was a small Cottontail Rabbit, a chipmunk, and a big fat desert rat. I caught the rabbit with my hands after missing it with buckshot. I had scared the poor creature up into shallow and reachable hole, where I snatched our first food in two days. Eric killed the rat and chipmunk.
The other fellow with us was a normally mild-mannered teacher, but went nuts on this trip. As i said, I’ll call him The Marine. He was an ex-Marine, and had really talked up his survival skills a good deal before the adventure. He didn’t tell us, however, that he was hypoglycemic, and some of his behavior on this trip requires I not give his real name. Mostly we starved on this little outing. We caught the rabbit, as I said the second day. Three men and one small rabbit isn’t much of a meal.
By the end of the second night, The Marine had Eric and I at gunpoint around a campfire on top of Black Mountain. “Silence! I’ll have total silence. There will be no talking at all,” the bleary eyed ex-Marine insisted, as he waved a small 25 automatic pistol at us. He had clearly lost it and was making us sit, as if we were unruly students in his history class.
Eric and I didn’t know what the problem was, but we assumed too much Mormon Tea and too little food had taken its toll. We finally talked The Marine into putting his gun away sent him off to his sleeping bag.
Eric and I discussed in whispers how we must find more food in the morning. I went to sleep hungry and worried about what we were going to do with our fellow traveler. The strangest dream awakened me in the night. I dreamed I heard my grandfather’s voice coming out of loudspeakers from all directions. “Billy!” my amplified grandfather yelled. “What in the hell are you doing boy?”
This woke me from a dead sleep as if a foghorn had blasted in my ear. I sat up, my bare back against one of the cold volcanic rocks, and pulled my sleeping bag around my hips. Something strange happened in the hills to the east. I saw what looked to be a horn made of white light rising from the horizon. I was astounded, and kept pushing my back against the rock to assure myself I was awake. The glowing white horn was real. In fact, it grew until it became a rising crescent moon in the starlight desert sky. I knew then that I too was becoming a victim some sort of strange nutritional imbalance.
We were each sleeping in our own house ring, among those that are on top of Black Mountain. Eric was in the rock ring to the east. “Hey Eric,” I said in a loud whisper. We gotta find some food in the morning.” Indeed, we rose before sunrise and Eric killed the chipmunk and rat before the golden glow wore off the morning.
We raced back to camp to find The Marine groggy and disoriented. I cleaned both creatures and was about to cook them whole when The Marine insisted I cut them up as if they were miniature deer. For this, I used a razor blade. He looked over my shoulder and named the various cuts, “chuck, rib, sirloin, tenderloin, shank, and brisket” as I worked. This seemed terribly important to him, and I found that if I engaged him in the process, he was a manageable but a muttering madman.
I cooked the miniature pieces in olive oil, using a backpacking frying pan the size of a saucer. The Marine must have realized how badly his body needed food, as he actually burned his fingers trying to fish out a piece of meat from the boiling oil. While we were more than willing to let him have all of it, The Marine insisted Eric and I eat some of the meat. One of the creatures tasted like liver, and the other tasted like sweet chicken. At the time we didn’t know which was which. I have since been told that the sweet meat was the rat.
The Marine even discovered that we could eat the small creature’s bones by grinding them to a powder with our molars. In my survival kit, I also had a 35mm film can full of Black-eyed Peas which I, soaked, cooked, and seasoned with dried Desert Cabbage. This too we devoured as we watched The Marine magically return to a mild-mannered history teacher.
Eric guided the poor chap back down to Bickel Camp and left me alone on top of Black Mountain. I took time to ponder the meaning of all this. After an hour or so of brooding in the silence one finds on mountain tops in the Mojave, I decided my grandfather had indeed asked the crucial question. What in the hell was I doing?
I packed my gear, and walked down the mountain to Bickel Camp. Walt was cooking bacon, eggs, and Chia seed pancakes for all comers. We laughed and told of our adventure over many cups of Bickel’s strong black coffee. The Marine was mostly quiet and seemed ashamed of how he faired on the survival test. Bickel, however, allowed as how, we were “all damn fools” for running off unprepared. Basically, he pointed out, we had been foolish and disrespectful of the desert and “you ought not to do that again.”
So it is, I’ve followed Bickel advise on such matters and have gone forth since with respect for all things sacred. I’ve kept my grandfather’s words near the surface in my wanderings. Since that experience, I’ve done my best to always act with intent. I’ve come to understand what I’m really doing with my life. And this has made it all, a mystical, magical tour.
