As travelers far from home, Juan and Kazz quickly learned much about each other. They both loved books and antiques. When Kazz learned that Juan had studied Tibetan Buddhism for twelve years, he wanted to know more.
“But it is a very difficult religion to describe,” Juan said. “I still find it confusing. Then I remembered Bon, the pre-Buddhist belief of the Tibetans. It’s very similar to Shinto.”
Bon worshipers, Juan explained, believed in a cult of divine kingship, much like a Shintoist worships the emperor. They also believed gods lived in the air, the earth, and the underworld. As with Shinto, Bon’s powerful essence—the belief in a unifying spirit world—was passed by song and dance from generation to generation, rather than by written text. This essence was eventually absorbed by the Tibetan Buddhists.
“I assumed Kazz knew about Shinto,” Juan continued after he told me about Bon. “He didn’t.”
“But he’s Japanese,” I said.
Juan shrugged. “He associated Shinto with World War II and militarism, and didn’t want anything to do with it.”
They spent a few days on the houseboat together before Kazz decided to accompany Juan to Ladakh, a desolate mountainous region, home for many of the Tibetan people. In 1974, after decades of isolation, Ladakh’s Indian rulers finally began allowing foreigners to enter.
Juan and Kazz spent a month together, visiting monasteries on the high plateaus and seeing sights that no outsider had experienced in modern times. During their travels, they continued sharing stories and even swapped acquired skills. Kazz showed Juan how to make prints by rubbing rice paper on rock and wood. Juan, who had turned his knowledge of antiques into a profitable business, showed Kazz many of his own tricks—how to detect fakes and how to avoid trouble at borders and customs. By the time they parted—Kazz to Japan, Juan to Nepal—a great friendship had formed.
They stayed in touch by mail. In 1978, two years after they met, Kazz returned to Nepal and they met up again.
“He was still wandering, still searching,” Juan remembered.
“No Shinto, eh?” I said.
“Not yet.”
Given their shared interests, it was inevitable that, on a purely practical level, Juan and Kazz would collaborate in the antique business. That meant that Juan would eventually travel to Japan.
“Kazz didn’t have a phone, and I arrived at his home unannounced,” Juan remembered. “He was getting married the next day. He never told me! But he made me his best man. Part of my responsibility was to sing a traditional song—in Japanese—but I sang it in Spanish instead.”
After the wedding, Kazz told Juan about a Shinto teacher with whom he had begun to study.
“What changed his mind about Shinto?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was the teacher. Maybe he got tired of searching. You’ll have to ask him.”
My thoughts turned to the 5,000 miles of ocean that separated me from Kazz, and I wondered if I would ever get the chance to ask him myself. Then Juan added, “The important thing is that Kazz was no longer a lost soul.”
“Did you meet the teacher?”
“Yes. He was very interesting. And a very powerful man.”
“Tell me more about him.”
“More?” Juan smiled. “You’ll have to meet him yourself.”
“Okay, you liked him. Kazz liked him. Then what?”
“The teacher and his disciples had already started the project placing the gods. They began in Japan, but they didn’t have much experience with the outside world. Kazz, with his years of searching, could travel with the efficiency of a pilgrim. He offered to help. He was perfect for the project, and the project was perfect for him.”
“When was the last time you saw Kazz,” I asked.
“More than two years ago, in 1981, here in San Francisco. He had placed gods in India, New York, Peru, and even the Antarctic. He was here to place another one.”
Juan stopped as if to remember. Then he shook his head. “What a day!”
Kazz had arranged for a skipper and a sailboat to take him beyond the Golden Gate Bridge to the Pacific Ocean.
“I went along.” Juan said. “The bay was calm, but just past the bridge the water was dark and violent. We nearly capsized.…”
“When was this?” I asked, a little too intensely.
Juan Li looked surprised by my question.
“In 1981.”
I grasped his arm. “No, exactly.”
He thought a moment.“The first weekend in March.” He looked down at my grip. “Why?”
“Go on. Never mind. What happened to Kazz?”
Juan looked at me a long moment before continuing.
“Just after Kazz threw the god overboard, a huge wave struck the yacht. Kazz was thrown against the railing. He was badly hurt, but he didn’t tell me until he was back in Japan a few weeks later. He wrote and told me that his back hurt so much he couldn’t travel.”
Juan saw my distant gaze. “Are you listening?”
“Sure.” But I wasn’t really. I was stuck on a remarkable similarity between Juan’s description of the near disastrous voyage and an experience of my own—on that same first weekend of March 1981, a year and a half before I heard of the Sword of Heaven.
I had just finished a photography assignment in Chico, a small town in Northern California. My client suggested that we visit Madam Ruby, a fortune teller who lived within walking distance. “She’s very good,” my client said when I showed reluctance.
Ruby greeted us in the waiting room and motioned for me to follow her. When we were alone in a separate, smaller room, the robust lady gently picked up my hand. She talked about my two brothers, and seemed to know that they are younger than I am. She said my father was having a hard time, and I replied that he was being forced into retirement. And yet, even though she was telling me things about myself and my life that required intimate knowledge, I remained the skeptical son of a scientist. Still, I pressed on, asking her about my future.
She held my hand firmly.“You are so impatient. You want everything now!”
Then, as if my hand had become electrically charged, she pushed it away. Ruby seemed to vanish, and instead I saw the bow of a ship heading straight toward me. A towering mast leaned sharply to the side. The water around the boat was black. The vision was as vivid as though captured on film. I felt both thrilled and scared. But most of all, I was filled with anticipation of great things to come.
The boat dissolved a few seconds later when I heard Ruby’s voice. She was leaning toward me, charcoal eyes intense. “I see a boat, or a yacht.”
“I saw a boat too!” I cried.
Then she added, “And a big project. Something spiritual and very successful. But very difficult.”
I pressed her for more details, but she dismissed me abruptly.
“Just relax,” she told me.“The answers will come in time.”
But I didn’t relax, and day after day I wondered how and when the premonition in the shape of a vision might manifest itself. I attached an inexplicable charge to anything that had to do with boats, water, and the spiritual. I turned my camera toward all types of water-going vessels, hoping to recreate my strange vision, and in the process of taking the pictures, to uncover a clue to its origin. After I became involved with the Sword of Heaven, I still didn’t feel the issue was resolved. Even though the project was clearly spiritual, there were no boats in Juan’s initial story. But now, by connecting my vision to Juan and Kazz’s seagoing adventure, that all changed. The riddle had been solved.
After a moment, I managed to ask Juan if Kazz had recovered from his injuries.
“He’s not well.”
“So that’s why he was so quick to send me a god,” I said. “He can’t place them himself.”
“Perhaps,” said Juan. “But why were you so quick to offer help?”
I had no simple answer and I sensed many forces at work. Clearly I was drawn to the project’s vision of world peace. Very soon I wo
uld come to understand that there were other motives at work that were still unclear to me. At that moment, however, I was beginning to appreciate the full significance of the boat vision. With it, I was more prepared to act on the project. Without it, my skeptical, rational mind might have had the last word, and Juan’s interesting story that first night in San Francisco would have remained just that, an interesting story followed only by dessert.
We rose to leave. Juan’s final words to me were, “I’ve told the story of the Sword of Heaven to many people. Few responded and helped. But you…I feel as if you were waiting for it.”
chapter 5
Dan on Mt. Shasta just before we reached the summit.
There was a turtle by the name of Bert.
And Bert the Turtle was very alert.
When danger threatened him he never got hurt.
He knew just what to do.
He’d Duck and Cover. Duck and Cover.
He did what we all must learn to do.
You and you and you and you.
Duck and Cover!
—From a 1950s government “Duck and Cover” campaign
July 29, 1983. This time, I’ll do it, I thought. My old childhood friend Dan Forey dozed in the car seat next to me. Right on the top. Perfect. In the distance Mount Shasta rose to 14,000 feet, its snow-tipped summit glistening in the afternoon sun.
It had been a month since I had tried to place the Shinto god at the Livermore Lab, a few weeks since my lunch with Juan Li.
Starting in my college days, I had made an annual summer pilgrimage to this majestic dormant volcano in Northern California. The first time was a late-night whim, inspired by too much beer. It ended the next morning, halfway up the mountain, when a freak lightning storm nearly killed me. Although the next five attempts to reach the summit were successful, I never again took the mountain for granted. This would be my first attempt with Dan.
“If I make it to the top, I’ll do it,” I repeated to Dan’s sleeping ear, as we neared the base of the mountain. “I won’t repeat what happened at the Lab.”
Dan woke and whistled as the mountain filled the window. Mount Shasta seemed huge, almost ominous, and I suddenly knew that I was lying to myself. I hadn’t yet figured out what had prevented me from placing the god at the Lab. Why should I be successful this time? I sensed under my resolve lurked debilitating doubts. I drove more slowly, only partially because the road had become winding and steep.
Dan and I agreed to make our ascent of Mount Shasta slowly and not macho our way up and back in one day. After hiking two-thirds of the way up, we bivouacked for the night next to Lake Helen, a grimy puddle of icy water. We placed our tent in the middle of a ring of rocks others before us built for protection from the fierce winds. We cooked a light meal, chased tiny chipmunks away from our packs, then watched the sun set. Behind us the sun turned the cliffs blood red. The valley below grew dark, and we saw the lights of the town of Mount Shasta appear below. Campfires glowed in the dark canyons. Neither Dan nor I spoke, content simply to watch the dazzling show.
Looking up at the peak from the valley below, it’s easy to understand why Mount Shasta has captured the imagination of so many people through the ages. It stands snow-covered and alone, apart from the mountain ranges to the east and west, almost a perfect cone. The native peoples of California believed Mount Shasta was a holy mountain, and worshipped it in deed and lore. The early European settlers were inspired by the mountain and created stories of their own: one claims that the Lemurians, the people of the lost continent of Atlantis, dwelled within the mountain. In recent years, many New Age rites and rituals have taken place at Mount Shasta. On our ascent, Dan and I stumbled across rocks still warm from sweat lodge ceremonies and examined strange tokens of wood and feather stuck in snowbanks. At one point we even heard eerie wailing coming from the dark wooded areas below.
The sun settled below the horizon, bringing a cold darkness, and in the protection of the tent we grew chatty. I told him about Donna Rini, a woman I had just started seeing.
I met her shortly after the newspaper article appeared. We were both swimming laps at a local public pool in San Francisco. Nice suit, I told her from my lane. Yeah, right, she said sarcastically, and pushed gracefully off the wall and continued her laps. A few laps later I got her to talk. Even though I towered over her, I didn’t think of her as small. She was three years older than me, quick-tongued and, true to her Italian background, expressed her emotions easily . She was an artist who worked with words and images. When she heard that I was a photographer who wrote, she told me about an art lecture on that subject by some New York artist I hadn’t heard of. We made plans to attend the lecture together, and things developed from there.
“Are we talking serious?” Dan asked.
“Hey, you know me!” I said. “Mr. Careful. In any case, she’s thinking about moving to New York. She says all artists need to live there at least for a while. So I’m not sure where the relationship is going.”
We went on to talk about childhood memories: Boy Scouts, band (he played trumpet, I played tuba), sports, and practical tricks.
“Remember the gunpowder and rockets your father taught us to make?” he asked. “Remember the one that nearly blew up the Sellers’ house?”
“And the hydrogen balloons! We’re lucky we didn’t kill ourselves, or someone else.…” I was laughing, recalling how my father showed us how to make hydrogen by dropping bits of aluminum foil into a solution of lye and water in a soft drink bottle. The chemical reaction filled a balloon stretched over the nipple with the lighter-than-air—and extremely explosive—hydrogen.
“And the bomb shelter,” Dan chimed in. “Mr. Mole!”
At the mention of the shelter I grew quiet.
While Dan reminisced about the Halloween parties we had in the bomb shelter, another memory came to me, one that I hadn’t thought about in a long time: the nuclear attack drills at East Avenue Elementary School.
We’d be in the middle of something, making pumpkins for Halloween or cutting out table decorations for the Thanksgiving table. Then, suddenly, the piercing whistle! Every fire alarm at the school would ring furiously.
“The Russians have launched an attack!” we’d cry to each other. “A nuclear warhead is headed toward the Lab, toward us!”
We’d duck under desks, tables, and chairs. A thermonuclear holocaust could melt entire buildings down to a puddle of molten mess; still, the teacher pulled the shades over the windows to protect us from falling glass. We were too young to question the absurd logic. After a terrifying fifteen minutes, school would be declared over for the day, and we would be sent home. I would go immediately to my bedroom/bomb shelter, where my two brothers waited, big-eyed and scared. I had no idea what the other schoolchildren did. Did they go to their own shelters? What were they thinking? We never mentioned the drills to each other until we were much older; by then, the psychic wounds were so deep they were barely acknowledged.
Dan took my silence for fatigue and turned to sleep. We hadn’t talked about the Shinto project but now clearly wasn’t the time. I was restless. I heard huge boulders, dislodged by the quick day-to-night temperature change, tumble down the slope above us, creating huge cascades of snow and gravel. A sudden wind snapped the sides of our tent violently against the poles and rocks. I felt the intense danger of the mountain, and our smallness.
It felt as if the mountain were dying and falling on top of us. Then I remembered that Shasta is a volcano. It’s not dying, I told myself. It’s being born. And it may explode any minute. I started having grisly visions of what would happen if the mountain exploded. Molten rock would fry us, and nothing would be left but charred bone. Before I finally fell asleep, I reached under my head and shifted the Shinto god, which I had cushioned with a towel and my shirt. Please help me, I said silently, aware that I was communicating with the god like a child in a crib might talk to his favorite stuffed bear.
I woke suddenly to Dan lightly slapping
my face. “You okay? You were yelling.”
The wind had stopped, and it was calm outside. My eyes bolted open.
“Okay, okay,” I gasped, struggling to pull my arms from my sleeping bag.
“You sure?” His face was alive with concern.
I shook my head. “It’s okay. Sorry. Go back to sleep.” As he settled back to sleep, the details of my nightmare slowly re-emerged.
I knew the dream well, but I hadn’t had it for years. It had started shortly after I moved into the bomb shelter and continued on a regular basis until I left for college. Then the nightmare only occurred when I was under stress: a new relationship, a particularly hard job. Throughout the 1970s it became less and less frequent, as if it were burrowing itself deeper and deeper into my psyche. Now it was back.
It always began the same way. I am in my bedroom, the bomb shelter, alone, lying on the metal cot. There is a loud noise. It comes from the escape hatch, the one I had painted fluorescent orange.
Wham! Someone or something is knocking. I reach for the light switch, but my arm is heavy as lead. I try to move a leg but I can’t. In the blackness, I sense something truly evil is outside. If I open the heavy metal door, whatever is on the other side will rush in. It will kill me, then kill my family sleeping peacefully upstairs. The pounding becomes more insistent. I want to run, but I am frozen with fear. And worse, I know the only way out is through the escape hatch—right past the evil itself. The escape hatch both protects me and prevents me from leaving. My mind and my body feel disconnected. I try to scream. Nothing.
Do something! Anything! Open the door!
No, I can’t!
The nightmare always ends the same way. I awake, drenched in sweat, silently screaming.
Now, next to me, Dan was breathing easily. He was asleep. I reached behind my head, grabbed the stone god, unzipped the opening to the tent, and placed it outside on the gravel. It didn’t help me after all.
The Sword of Heaven Page 4