The Shasta Gate

A Breathtaking Exploration of Love, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality on California’s Legendary Mount Shasta

By Dick Croy

Catherine took a deep breath and sat down, her eyes never leaving the face of the woman in the mirror. Her gaze moved up to the eyes and held them. She became calmer still: not less distressed but more in control and accepting of her emotional state. Finally she rose with calm deliberation to find Ram…

For some time they rode in silence. Catherine didn’t want to begin just anywhere and end up rambling incoherently like some moron aimlessly turning the late night radio dial. She wasn’t about to give Ram the impression she was that lost and out of control. She didn’t want to waste his time and energy either.

“…You know what the biggest myth about the human race is?” she finally asked. “It’s that what sets us apart from the ‘lower’ animals is our ability to build on knowledge from one generation to the next. What a crock that is! We don’t learn a damn thing.”

Ram smiled at this prototypical opening. It was customary that the more desperately Catherine needed to discuss a personal problem, the further removed from it she tried to appear.

“Why is it after what – two million years? – we still don’t have it together? Every other species has worked out some kind of relationship with the planet. But we haven’t handed down any answers or patterns to follow, and we’ve been asking the same goddamned questions for thousands of years. Are we really that stupid? It’s a wonder we’ve survived as long as we have!”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?” Ram asked gently.

“I am! There ought to be some guidelines for people to follow – when they’re breaking away from their families and trying to make it on their own. I’m not talking about predetermined cookie-cutter careers or anything like that, but some simple…I don’t know – guidelines. Like your tribal rituals. Initiation. Why don’t we have any rituals?”

“I’m afraid you’d find them too confining. They exact a great deal in individual freedom for the sense of continuity they provide.”

“But at least they gave you some kind of communal framework, didn’t they? To build on. What does our society give us? Nothing! What do our families give us? What families?”

She was almost crying. He remembered how as a child and fighting sleep, she would work herself into a state of infantile rage to simultaneously release and exhaust herself.

“What the hell are we supposed to do with our lives, Ram? My life is shit. I’ve really messed it up.” She fought back the surge of self-pity welling up in her throat. It would be too humiliating to be overcome by it in Ram’s presence. “…And yet, there’s no one I’d trade places with. I can’t see that I’m in worse shape than anyone else. Most people sell themselves out for so little. They’re such whores.”

…Ram knew she had to let go – if not here and now then soon. He reined over to a grove of lodge pole pines and the stallion followed. They dismounted onto a thick carpet of needles and walked wordlessly – Catherine lethargically in the confusion and profusion of her emotions – to a fallen tree.

Beyond the girdle of evergreens were low foothills climbing to a ridge, which the shadow of a massive rack of cumulus had bisected into halves of light and shade. Behind them was the Mt. Shasta. They sat down on the broad girth of the tree.

“I don’t know what I’m doing at the ranch, and I don’t know what I’m doing at school,” she continued. “But I can’t figure out where else I should be.”

“You are here,” he said. “Life is not to be ‘figured out.’ It will always elude you.”

“But I’ve got to have some kind of plan don’t I? I can’t just be wandering around trying this, trying that – there isn’t time. I could make some serious mistakes right now.”

“Make them.”

“What do you mean, make them? I make enough mistakes as it is without trying to make them.”

“Make them and get rid of them. Hold on to nothing.”

“…I’m afraid, Ram. I can’t just…let go like that. I don’t know where I’d land.”

“Your fear is as natural as your skin,” he said gently, putting his arm around her grateful shoulders. “So is the anger inside.” He took a deep breath, his huge hand spread out across his chest for emphasis. “Feel them. Feel them both.”

“Why is it natural to be afraid? That feels so… twisted.” Her face reflected her words: she felt as though she stood for all mankind, asking her question in the agony of a whole species.

Dick Croy is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist and playwright. He was writer and director of The Fourth Dimension, a documentary series of seven 60-minute television specials on the paranormal. His novel The River Jordan, co-authored by Henry Burke, was a Foreword Magazine book-of-the-year nominee in 2001.