Due to some bad choices I made concerning relationships, back a few years now, I made some life changes. Life changes, to put it lightly, involved unplugging from the current matrix of friends and family relations, selling my house that I spent five years pouring money, blood, sweat, and tears into, grabbing the dog, the cats, and hit the road in a an old modified Chevy van. I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going, but I knew that I was free from a dangerous game where I was the prey of a pack of jackals. Believe me when I say that the current system of things in this country is corrupt,(please forgive me Obama fans)so corrupt down to the doctor, lawyer, cop, and judge scale that No new president is going to change anything with the present situation. The first destination I ended up at was the Black Rock Desert/Pyramid Lake area. There I meditated and cleansed my body, I did my own intuitive doctoring of some serious side effects of various compounds that were in my system. To put it simply, the pack jackals, some of whom I trusted as friends, were poisoning me, by all account I should have died. Mercury, Lye, sulfuric acid, phosphorous, and God only knows what else. I spent a month driving around that region of Nevada going from hot spring to hot spring until I felt normal again, if there is such a thing as 'normal'. After that initial month or so sojourn without hardly talking to any human being I drove back to the city I left to deal with two large storage units crammed full. The days of Chris Farley talking about living in a van down by the river are gone, if a game warden, crusty farmer type, or the police see you , you're threatened with arrest, and a person might as well hang it up after that.So, I headed to the mountains where I could find a place on private logging land and camp for free. A location with running water, safety for my pets and self, and maybe make a fresh start. I drove to a small town in the Lassen National Forest at about the 4500' elevation mark and found a spot. A spot full of mixed emotions from yesteryear, each day was not always a pleasure, as one can imagine. It was spring time, however there were some days it snowed six inches and I couldn't have gotten the van out of it's location if my life depended on it, I was snowed in. Five miles down the road was a small community which was unaware of my habitation where I was at, I was very guarded and secretive of myself and my precious pets. For if the tiny township knew of my hideaway in those early days they would've ran my ass out of town in a heartbeat.I befriended the townspeople, did volunteer work for some of the elderly and misfortunate, gained their trust until people started handing me money, asking me to work for them, asking me if I was alright. Eventually I caved and divulged my secret local and even the local sheriff, forest service law enforcement, and the local sierra pacific patrol officer unofficially sanctioned my presence at my forest abode.Living with nature in the forest was not new to me, being a survivalist and an all around outdoorsman I felt right at home, 'chop wood, carry water'. Since being in Nevada and all, the time spent alone, the world slipped away, locals said I was the closest thing to a wild human being that they had ever seen. I no longer listened to the radio, news, music, they were too distracting and I was still in the throws of post traumatic stress from the ordeals I chose to remove myself from. I, however, considered myself very Buddhist and Zen, i never did care what others thought about how I carried my life out.Living with nature revealed things to me that I'd never seen in my life, and I was basically raised in the woods in rural New Hampshire. The first strange encounters was with different types of spirits, some of which 'talked' to me and 'told' me what they were and others that, I think, were curious or just plain were observing me. But I knew they were not some figment of a half broken mans imagination because my dog and cats would interact with them. Zappa, a pound puppy pure bread Flat Coat Retriever, alerted me to the first spirit by barking and, what appeared, playing with it.The snows melted, the rains stopped, I decided to get out of the cramped van and spread my beddings out onto the forest floor to sleep under the stars. Well, the first critter to adopt me was a raven, every morning and evening this raven, I named 'Blacky' would pay me a visit. A very curious fellow, he liked anything shiny and sparkley, I went as far as donating him'or'her some trinkets for it's nest. Blacky became almost as much as a pet as the dog and the cats, and I could feed him by hand, although he didn't like to be pet like you would with a cat, but he would give me this half cocked stare when I spoke to him as if he was actually listening, he was also an excellent alarm clock in the mornings. Blacky was there for me everyday for all of the nine months I was there until the snows came in Autumn.On days that I wasn't preoccupied working for various townsfolk, I would spend roaming around the countryside, exploring the forests in ever larger circles around my camp to gain familiarity with my surroundings. One day I noticed a nesting pair of Osprey Eagles and I could swear that they were talking to me saying,'Hello, we see you, we've been watching you' and I would talk back 'Hello beautiful critters' and the closest whistling approximation to an Ospreys call as I could come, actually I got pretty good at it. They became 'friends' of mine or at least they never appeared disturbed whatsoever by my presences. If they saw me riding my bicycle to town they would circle me below the canopy of the pines and fir trees, chortling me down or up the road. I watched and observed and learned all summer, those two Ospreys raise a chic and come visit me at camp with their fledgling as a family unit, but only if I was alone without any other humans about. I felt so privileged and honored by them.Of coarse, no forest story would be complete without bear encounters. Now, I'm not sure what the experts with bears say about what to do or what not to do when one is encountered by a bear, but when they are in the back of my van eating all my food I tended to get pissed off and run them out of there with nothing but my voice and maybe a handy chunk of firewood. I would get really mad and chase after the bruins. Eventually they allotted me the respect that I asked of them after only two serious encounters, the first of which my dog ran off five miles down the road and I found him twelve hours later at the local Bar and grill. I guess Zappa figured that the bears would fill up on the restaurant food before they felt like eating dog.Deer were common and sometimes in groups of upwards of twenty, and they would just stroll through my camp unbothered by my presence, even Zappa would sit or stand still until they passed. Coyotes were a nuisance but I discovered with night vision goggles that if I stacked rocks, the rocks would spook them away, and at night Zappa would run them out, he was quite good at that. Raccoons were, definitively, the comedians of all the forest critters, and it became almost a nightly event of them meddling with food stuffs and gear, sometimes whole families of their chatteringnesses would be fiddling with various items left out, didn't have anything to do with food it seemed most of the time. Raccoons are a curious lot of clown bandits.To be continued.......