Touching Cottonwood Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Prologue

  ONE - A Vision Quest

  TWO - The Escape

  Map of Cottonwood

  THREE - Cottonwood

  FOUR - The Home

  FIVE - Suffering

  SIX - The Homecoming

  SEVEN - Rebecca

  EIGHT - Agent Westmore

  NINE - The Reunion

  TEN - Mount Rainier

  ELEVEN - On Main Street

  TWELVE - Sheriff John O’Neil

  THIRTEEN - Emergency Room Report

  FOURTEEN - The Breakdown

  FIFTEEN - Yamamoto Farm

  SIXTEEN - Silence

  SEVENTEEN - Old Blind Carl

  EIGHTEEN - No Reason

  NINETEEN - Psychiatric Evaluation

  TWENTY - A Gift

  TWENTY-ONE - Amanda and Chelsea

  TWENTY-TWO - The Western Meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta)

  TWENTY-THREE - The Emergency Committee

  TWENTY-FOUR - Ernie’s Diner

  TWENTY-FIVE - Ontario (Oregon)

  TWENTY-SIX - Missing Baby

  TWENTY-SEVEN - McCann Park

  TWENTY-EIGHT - At the Home

  TWENTY-NINE - Old Blind Carl’s Cane

  THIRTY - Judge Reynolds

  THIRTY-ONE - Old Blind Carl’s House

  THIRTY-TWO - The Scent of Jasmine

  THIRTY-THREE - The State Arrives

  THIRTY-FOUR - The Light of Day

  THIRTY-FIVE - The Dead Zone

  THIRTY-SIX - Playing Dice

  THIRTY-SEVEN - In the Garden

  THIRTY-EIGHT - The Miracle Fridge

  THIRTY-NINE - Found Baby

  FORTY - A Meeting at the Home

  FORTY-ONE - The Search Party

  FORTY-TWO - Idaho

  FORTY-THREE - The Worldwide Web

  FORTY-FOUR - A Hen Session

  FORTY-FIVE - The Six O’clock News

  FORTY-SIX - The Jackpot

  FORTY-SEVEN - Ogden

  FORTY-EIGHT - A Night at the Home

  FORTY-NINE - Ernie Martinelli, Jr.

  FIFTY - Sunday Morning

  FIFTY-ONE - A Ride Home

  FIFTY-TWO - Detour

  FIFTY-THREE - An Empty House

  FIFTY-FOUR - Coffee Cake Revelations

  FIFTY-FIVE - Extra Confirmation

  FIFTY-SIX - A First Attempt

  FIFTY-SEVEN - The Cold Hard Truth

  FIFTY-EIGHT - Walking

  FIFTY-NINE - Dinner in Jail

  SIXTY - A Little Help from the Judge

  SIXTY-ONE - A Night at the Slumberjack

  SIXTY-TWO- Into Cottonwood

  SIXTY-THREE - A Trusting Wife

  SIXTY-FOUR - Face to Face

  SIXTY-FIVE - Discovery

  SIXTY-SIX - The Investigation Begins

  SIXTY-SEVEN - Perfect Pies and Perfect Circles

  SIXTY-EIGHT - A Dark Ride Home

  SIXTY-NINE - Deadzonmechanic

  SEVENTY - The Visitor

  SEVENTY-ONE - Seeing and Believing

  SEVENTY-TWO - Footsteps

  SEVENTY-THREE - Closing Arguments

  SEVENTY-FOUR - Supplies

  SEVENTY-FIVE - Ned’s Baby Returns

  SEVENTY-SIX - The Center of the Dead Zone

  SEVENTY-SEVEN - Matthew

  SEVENTY-EIGHT - The Darkest Ride

  SEVENTY-NINE - The Note

  EIGHTY - Missing

  EIGHTY-ONE - Back to the Farm

  EIGHTY-TWO - Diane’s Web

  EIGHTY-THREE - On the Trail

  EIGHTY-FOUR - Milk and Breadcrumbs

  EIGHTY-FIVE - Bound

  EIGHTY-SIX - In the Flesh

  EIGHTY-SEVEN - At the Boundary

  EIGHTY-EIGHT - The Hounds

  EIGHTY-NINE - Sharing of Tea

  NINETY - A Friend to the Rescue

  NINETY-ONE - Chelsea

  NINETY-TWO - The Race

  NINETY-THREE - The Abyss

  NINETY-FOUR - Hounds in the Garden

  NINETY-FIVE - Three Shots

  NINETY-SIX - Release

  NINETY-SEVEN - Hide and Seek

  NINETY-EIGHT - Bullets and Breadcrumbs

  NINETY-NINE - At the River

  ONE HUNDRED - Chocolate Shakes

  ONE HUNDRED ONE - The Candle

  ONE HUNDRED TWO - Revelations

  ONE HUNDRED THREE - Reports and Tasty Burgers

  ONE HUNDRED FOUR - A Memorable Memorial

  ONE HUNDRED FIVE - The Fool

  ONE HUNDRED SIX - The Buzz at Ernie’s

  ONE HUNDRED SEVEN - Star Hidden

  ONE HUNDRED EIGHT - Touching Cottonwood

  Acknowledgements

  I am deeply appreciative to Pamela Hoffman and Barbara Green for the honest review and feedback given on the earliest drafts of this book. Each of their suggestions made the manuscript far better than it would have been otherwise. A special note of gratitude must also be given to my editor, Marketa Edwards, who not only read the earliest drafts but painstakingly read and edited all subsequent drafts right up through the final layout. Her gentle encouragement, dedicated and artful editing, and overall belief in this story were absolutely essential to making this book a reality. And a final note of thanks to Mother Nature, who wisely stranded me in a blizzard at Logan International Airport long enough for me to write several key chapters and to get much better acquainted with the characters of Cottonwood, Colorado.

  For Kathy, Ryan, and Evan...

  Your love and support are my miracles.

  Prologue

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  William Shakespeare

  Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

  It is difficult to say with certainty the nature of the forces and principalities descending upon the town of Cottonwood, Colorado. They were mysterious and hidden, yet soon to be revealed in the everyday lives of her citizens. A scientifically minded person might well call these changes coincidental—or simply impossible. For others, they could well be seen as miraculous. But the miraculous is a subjective thing, much like beauty, and while Plato taught that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it could equally be said that the miraculous is in the heart.

  As each heart is unique, so too the nature of the miraculous as revealed to each heart is dependent upon the individual. Surely there are as many definitions for miracles as those who care to ponder the question, but in the end they all point at the occurrence of an event or events happening outside the expected rules of what an individual thinks is possible in the universe—and therein lies the key to miracles—for each person has a different set of rules for what they think is possible. Those rules are given by experience and come mainly from one’s religious or scientific perspective on the nature of things. In this way, both religion and science serve the same function—to define what is possible—and what might be considered miraculous.

  In the tens of thousands of years of human history, before the modern age, when the old religions and natural spirituality ruled the human heart, miracles were accepted as a matter of fact. Perhaps much has been gained by shedding these old and dusty traditions, but perhaps much has been lost as well—for there can be life in dust, though sometimes hidden and difficult to see. And though a scientist may scoff at the notion, it is not inaccurate to say that in many ways science has become the religion of the modern age, replacing the old religions—without the miracles. For like the priests of ancient religions, the scientist now plays a similar role by offering humanity a framework from which to distinguish what is possible, or not, in the cosmos
. For the pure scientist, there are no miracles—only laws and relationships between things that remain undiscovered. The primary foundational rule of science is that all things are knowable to human reason alone. Science discovers laws and rules for the way things operate, and those scientific laws and rules give the universe order and meaning, and in this way science provides a function no different than religion has for thousands of years.

  All religions have their secrets, and all may seem well with the modern age until science’s little secret gets out—a secret not widely known by the majority of non-scientists but puzzled and fretted over constantly by those on the inside—the priestly caste of scientists. There is a sort of crazy cousin living in the basement of science, and despite all the marvelous things science has brought to the world, the religion of science has an embarrassing gap in its explanation of the universe—there is a hollowness and a gigantic mystery at its very core.

  At the center of the great mystery facing science lie what are currently known as “dark matter” and “dark energy.” These substances, which appear to be two different forms of the same thing, permeate the entire universe, unseen and, for the most part, undetectable. Scientists only know of their existence by the mysterious effects they appear to exert across enormous reaches of space. The most embarrassing part, and the part which the priestly scientists must grapple with every day, is the inescapable truth that while dark energy and dark matter make up the majority of the universe and though many clever theories have been offered to explain these mysteries—they have absolutely no idea what dark matter and dark energy actually are—meaning that scientists have no idea what makes up the majority of the universe. It is as though science, with all its modern tools and sophistication, has been describing a bit of foam on the very tops of the ocean, while vast and hidden depths of mystery and deeper truths rest far below. Perhaps science is like the person studying the foam that forms at the top of a churning ocean, when actually the formations and movements of that surface foam are influenced in subtle ways by the hidden currents, motions, and larger life hidden at greater depths. Scientists could be thought of as priests of the sea-foam, yet knowing nothing of the greater ocean.

  Long before the terms dark matter and dark energy were created by modern science, the great scientific genius Sir Isaac Newton was indeed genius enough to realize the limitations of science and summed the situation up nicely when he said:

  “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier seashell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

  When Sir Newton and his scientific discoveries are spoken of in most science classes, rarely discussed in any depth is his more spiritual side. Seldom is it mentioned that he was also a mystic and alchemist and clearly saw limitations to what the practice of science and pure reason alone could ever know or understand. For Newton there were deeper truths to life—even more important than the “prettier seashells” he brought to the scientific understanding of the world. Newton played with science like a boy might play with seashells on the beach, but his heart was always seeking deeper mysteries in the dark and infinite ocean of the living cosmos.

  Nature is always most efficient in her operations, and it is possible that the mysterious dark matter and dark energy are really not so dark after all. It would seem a great waste of the hidden substances making up the majority of the universe not to have them interact with everything else in some way and on some level. Perhaps they remain unseen to the techniques and practices of science but actually reveal themselves at every moment in ways science would not suspect or measure. Perhaps dark matter and dark energy represent the very living core of a living universe, touching lives and flowing in and out of daily human affairs far more frequently than imagined or allowed for by the religion of science. Perhaps the mystery of dark matter and dark energy is a source of what could be called the miraculous and is inherently cut off from the techniques of science, much like a person trying to fathom the breadth and magnificence of a great mountain but using a microscope to do so.

  Dark matter and dark energy might very well be modern scientific terms for a mystery which has already been acknowledged throughout the ages by more ancient arts. Perhaps the leading priests of science are only now beginning to understand what the poet, the traditional priest, and the shaman have known for centuries—the universe is a great web of infinite, mysterious, and living connectedness, and like the great currents that connect all the oceans of the earth, the hidden connectedness of the living cosmos runs very deep—to the very core and heart of everything. Most importantly, if one were to believe the shamans and poets, this mystery is far deeper and more complex than the limited human mind or a set of scientific theories or equations could ever hope to explain or understand.

  Just because the deeper mystery and miracles of the universe may rest beyond the grasp of science, is not to say they are beyond the grasp of the heart—so long as that heart is attuned to seeing and feeling those deeper realities invisible to the eyes alone. Science would not even acknowledge that the heart, which it sees only as an organ to pump blood, can “know” anything. To science, knowledge is a function only of the brain—fortunately, poets know better. As the Irish poet James Stephens wrote:

  “What the heart knows today, the head will understand tomorrow.”

  Even though limited human scientific reasoning may not have the power to grasp the nature of the mystery it calls dark matter and dark energy, if one were to believe the far older language and insights of the poets, and others so spiritually inclined, then the far more interesting question is not if this mystery touches the world of human affairs, but how?

  For scientists, there is mystery at the heart of matter, and for the poet, shaman, and mystic, that mystery is a matter of the heart. It was perhaps this mystery, this unfathomable connectedness of all things, known first by the heart and perhaps later by the head, that was descending upon the small town of Cottonwood.

  One

  A Vision Quest

  The ancient scent of damp forest, wood, and campfire clung to the evening air as darkening, gray rolling clouds, fringed in a salmon pink from the setting sun, built over the mountains to the west. A moist cool breeze moved up and across the valley from the direction of those clouds, sweeping the smoke from the campfire toward the east and into the giant Douglas fir and red cedar trees. Scattered along the sloping wooded hillside and surrounding a blazing campfire were more than a dozen small tents. Equally scattered in the dimming light were groups of three or four young boys busy with various after-dinner activities. One group was down the hill by the stream, washing out their cookware and occasionally and playfully splashing each other; another gathered on a log near the fire, discussing nothing in particular but letting out frequent peals of laughter; and still another group huddled near the edge of camp, throwing small pebbles at a squirrel resting high above on a branch of a Douglas fir. The animal looked down on the boys, swishing its tail back and forth while chattering away in squirrel-speak and all the while not seeming overly concerned about its chances of actually being hit. It could have easily jumped to a much higher branch or off to another tree, but it seemed as much amused by the boys as the boys were of it. All in all, it was a perfect evening in every detail and another end to a typical day of camping for Scout Troop 458 from Tacoma, Washington.

  Though difficult to sense directly, the seemingly unremarkable evening was infused with a certain higher level of energy. All the campers, both the young boys and their adult supervisors, knew that shortly they’d be treated to something special to end their week of camping—one of the rangers from the park would soon join them to give a “ranger talk” during their evening campfire.

  Standing near the fire was the Scoutmaster, a tall and stout man whose appearance was a bit amusing, as his huge frame was wrapped so awkwardly
and tightly by his Scoutmaster uniform that one might expect buttons to begin popping off at any moment. He began ringing a cowbell to let all the boys know it was time to gather back at the campfire. He’d spotted their evening guest fast approaching the camp from the trail that led down the mountainside toward the parking lot. The boys who had been washing their dishes down at the stream were already hiking back up the hill, but they quickened their pace upon hearing the clanging of the cowbell. The group that had been entertaining the squirrel took their last few quick and halfhearted tosses at the animal and also headed toward the ringing bell. The squirrel watched them leave and was perhaps a bit saddened to see its evening’s entertainment coming to an end.

  Now nearly at the top of the trail, the ranger approached the camp. He was a tall and muscular young man in his late twenties. His curly brown hair, cut longer than one might expect for a ranger, flowed out from beneath his standard U.S. Forest Service olive drab, wide-brimmed hat. He entered the campground carrying a small drum down at his left side. The drum was of a simple construction made from a hollow, round piece of wood, with strands of animal-gut lacing a piece of hide stretched tightly across the top. It had a raw and authentic appearance—far more authentic than the overly decorated, faux Native American items found at tourist shops.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever arrived to quite that kind of welcome before,” said the ranger as he walked up to the Scoutmaster who stood near the fire still holding the cowbell in one hand. Though both men were about the same height, the Scoutmaster’s stoutness made the ranger appear thinner than he actually was.

  The Scoutmaster glanced down at the cowbell and then back to the ranger. “Well, I’d like to tell you it was all for you,” he replied, “but I’m always ringing this. It’s really just the most simple and effective way of getting the Scouts’ attention.” He then smiled and reached out with his free hand and shook the ranger’s free hand. “Brad Lawrence.”

  “Matthew Duncan,” replied the ranger.

  “We really appreciate you taking your time to come out here tonight. The boys have been looking forward to it all week, and I know I sure have.”