This Beauty below was in my in box when I went online this Sunday morning, and I replied, and she replied, and then a grandfossil showed up, and there was more back and forth.
Rolling on the River
Leaving Lucifer II cont'd
https://elizabethro.substack.com/p/rolling-on-the-river
ELIZABETH RO
MAR 3, 2024
That morning, as in every morning for the past few weeks, I woke to hear the fish wheel. My husband had left a little earlier to go up river to find some standing dead cottonwood trees. This meant that the tree had died but remained upright. The process caused the tree to dry quickly and this, the natives said, was the best wood to burn for smoking salmon. That fish wheel, I swear I could hear the salmon sliding and sloshing into the trough as the baskets on the fish wheel, moved by the current, plunged deep, deep into the swift Yukon River scooping up one salmon run after another. “Swish, flop, wiggle drop”, the endless white noise as the salmon fell into the trough. I would retrieve the catch as soon as my husband returned with the river boat-another day at fish camp…
I rolled over and stretched before I rose. India was a year and a half ago but still each morning as I rose I felt the tug in my heart which remained at the Ashoka Mission Vihara in Mehrauli, India. There was a rooster at the mission and every morning before dawn he would flap his massive wings and crow. Now it was the sound of fish sliding down the chutes and rather than pending hours of meditation, I would be performing hours of manual labor. Manual labor of processing and smoking salmon-the old fashioned way. The baby stirred in my tummy as I brought myself to the present moment-oh did I not tell you? I was now about 5 months pregnant.
I had returned from India, married J and we had purchased a riverboat and moved to Galena, Alaska, a village on the Yukon River. He was a bush pilot. I found work at the liquor store, I got pregnant, we decided we wanted to learn a more self-sufficient lifestyle, collected a nice group of huskies for a dog team, quit our jobs and moved down river to Ruby, Alaska, one of the finest Indian villages you’ll ever find. In retrospect it happened quickly, just like that, except every moment of that retrospective is alive and even now as I breathe this adventurous story into being, I can go there and BE there. The quality of air, its coolness; the quiet sounds like the Yukon River lazily brushing its sandy depths, the sight of endless spruce trees, white ptarmigans hidden in the first snowfall that magically flutter away. 30 below parkas and freeze-dried produce that you ran to the store to get. Just a short jaunt of perhaps a city block away; you get home and the celery leaves flake off into powder. It’s all there inside of me and makes up part of me; as I reach for the salt, it’s in the movement, in the very breath and blood of my human life form.
I got out of bed-our little shanty was almost just the bed. I figure it was no more than about 9x10; wooden framed and sided with sheet metal. Metal all the way to the roof and, Lord help me, it was hot when the sun was shining-which was always. When dusk came-our term for evening in the summer, we hoped for a breeze to sweep through the shanty to chase away the heat. Sometimes it came; most often it didn’t. I looked over to the *Blazo box shelves for the matches to light the tiny Coleman stove we kept on the small, really small front porch. I’d made some beans the day before so I would fry up a few eggs and that would be our morning meal. The small porch was also our cooler for storing food that would perish if kept in our tiny, hot, house. It worked and all summer our activities were centered around processing the salmon that ran up that big, muddy, Yukon River.
Every summer the villages thin out as the families move to their fish camp. The salmon runs of the Yukon are the lifeblood of the families for winter food. One run comes after another as the salmon move closer to their spawning grounds so it’s an all summer job. Each family has a spot on the river and has had that spot for generations. The family fish camp is situated near an eddy (deeper water) in the river. The fish wheel which acts on the same principle of a watermill is placed on top of the eddy. In place of paddles, two baskets scoop up the fish that are running up the river.
A chute attached to the baskets slides the fish down into a trough where they stay until someone retrieves them and ferries them, by boat, back to the fish camp for processing; smoking or drying. This is all done on the river since there are no roads back to camp or to the villages. Harvesting and processing is from dawn to dusk.
Not long after we moved to Ruby, we were fortunate enough to strike up a deal with Albert and Dolly. They had purchased Altona Brown’s family fish camp. Her only child had died a few years back and that was all she had left of relatives. Albert and my husband agreed to a deal where we (husband and I) would move to the fish camp, run the fish wheel, and process the salmon for half the catch. The camp was a mile from Ruby. Albert and Dolly were aging and were happy to pass on the responsibility.
While waiting for the run to come in, we stayed at the roadhouse. As we got closer and closer to the run the villagers waited anxiously. One day while I was sitting at the dining table of the Esmailka’s house a tiny white butterfly fluttered by the window. “When you see that butterfly, that means the run is coming in about two weeks” Harold was passing on to me what the elders had once told him. I watched the butterfly flit in and out of plants and flowers then off it went to nearby flora out of my line of vision. Sure enough, rumors swelled about where the salmon were-one day-two days out. It was coming and coming soon. My thoughts traveled back to Harold Esmailka’s statement and my fingers counted about 14 days. Sure enough; the salmon were coming.
We moved to the fish camp, tethered our dog team to poles planted firmly into the river bank and began to move our meager possessions up the hill to our little shanty. Right next to our lodging the giant smokehouse loomed over us. It was the size of a warehouse three-stories high and 20 feet or more across. After we unpacked in our tiny space we went over to look at the smokehouse where we would be filling it to the rafters with smoking fish. It was huge-in my mind I could not imagine the need for such heights in hanging salmon. Peeled spruce poles crisscrossed the scaffolding all the way to the top. The smell of smoke was embedded into every inch of the warehouse.
Albert would be there the first day of the run to show us how to prepare the salmon for smoking and that day was coming soon. My heart was soaring with excitement as the day neared. J went out and did the first harvesting of standing dead cottonwood. The dogs were neatly tethered; we were ready.
Albert ran us all the way through the process. He rode in our riverboat to view the first catch of salmon that were waiting for us in the trough of the wood and chicken-wire fish wheel. We scooped them up and brought them back to the camp. The wheel was almost halfway between us and Ruby. Our eddy was one of the best on the river; it hugged a rocky cliff that was at least 30 feet high. The water ran swiftly and deep on this one. Back at fish camp, we had a gravity fed water hose placed in the creek that brought ice-cold water down into a galvanized steel tub situated near the creek's edge and back from the river. The tub was our holding tank for the fresh catch. As we gutted and prepped the fish at the fish table, the others, now dead, chilled in its icy cold water.
After the catch was put in the tub, Albert moved to the cutting table and we moved in close to him as he began to explain the whole shebang of fish preparation. I won’t go into the lengthy conversation but it was detailed and specific to each run. The dog salmon, for instance, would not be dipped in a salt-water brine like the king salmon would. The fileted salmon were carried up to a hanging rack that resembles gymnastics parallel bars about 6 feet high; all made of peeled spruce. Seven prepped fish dangle from a pole and that pole hangs between the two parallel bars . The fish straddle the pole by the tail end-inside out. We would have to have smudge fire under the salmon as they “glazed” creating a shiny veneer that would seal the salmon.
“You must keep the smudge going otherwise flies will plant their eggs in the salmon and destroy the process” Albert solemnly told us. Smudge-he showed us, was collected quackgrass and such-you light it but don’t create a fire; a smoke must rise from the burn and remain smoldering under the fish to keep the flies away. The fish were cut with a machete that must be razor sharp. He then showed us how to sharpen the machete with a sharpening steel and tested it on the hairs of his wrist-a clean shave. “That’s how sharp it must be at all times to avoid tearing,” he told us.
The poles of hanging salmon were on a slight rise of ground between the shore and the warehouse and had to be taken up the steep hill to the smokehouse once they were properly glazed. The first catch would be placed on the lowest scaffolding in the smokehouse and as time passed they were moved up, up and up to the highest part of the ceiling; making way for more and more poles of processing fish. In so many weeks you could jar some, in so many weeks you had the gyeoga ready for the dog teams winter food (non-salted or brined). At about 6 weeks you had the best smoked king salmon in the world. All the time the cottonwood must smolder under a piece of sheet metal and beneath the fish-24/7.
As Albert chanted his litany, I rocked back and forth, “Boy, this will be fun!” I exclaimed. Albert stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “This is work,” he said. I felt sorry for him. This poor man has no pleasure in life. I thought to myself.
Now, as I stretched and lumbered my way to the shoreline, viewed the holding tank of fish, gazed at the table and sharpened my knife I knew what he was talking about. Baby growing, winter coming and food wanting. “This is work, let's get on with it…”
*Blazo boxes are wooden boxes that hold two, square, five gallon tins of kerosene oil. This was the way the oil was shipped back in the day. The boxes are as prized as the tins of fuel. They make good stools, shelves, drawers, etc. If you spotted one abandoned on the shore you made sure you got there before anyone else did to claim it.Sloan BashinskyThis is lovely.I’m curious why you named your books “Leaving Lucifer”?Elizabeth RoThank you and I am honored you liked it. I think you are an amazing writer and I enjoy the writes you put out, so I am double, double honored.
I wrote my first book Leaving Lucifer, Part 1 (available on Amazon) which details my drive to India and meditating in a Buddhist monastery for 5 months. It's a light-hearted read although the title appears dark. So, what I am placing on my Stack is the Part 2, the END. I use Lucifer to represent the going from one place of knowledge (brain) to another place of awareness (heart).Sloan BashinskyAh, so.
I recall hearing from time to time that an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop, and that the heart has its own reasons that reason cannot understand.
I often have mused that the Indian art of Kali wearing a necklace of severed men’s heads, while she held up a severed man’s head in one of her four hands, and a sword in another of her hands, and her tongue is stuck out, and she stands with both feet on Shiva lying on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, looking up at her, and a horde of angry half-naked women behind Kali suggests she doesn’t care for how men think :-).
Twice in the past few years, I let men in India get inside my laptop after they persuaded me they would fix it for me, and then they tried to stick me up, and after trying to reason with them didn’t work, I told them that in the fall of 2002, a woman I was sweet on told me in a dream, “Sloan, you married Kali!”, and I woke up, terrified. Then, I was taken into yet another course in looking at me in a mirror. After hearing that, the men in India restored my laptop to me and bid me adieu.
I passed through Mumbai for 3 days in 2000, but otherwise my experiences with India are from reading about it and talking with people I go to know well, who went to India and lived in ashrams, and they felt it was really important that they did it, and they were struggling to move on to the next place their souls wanted to them to go.
Looks to me that your soul took you to the Yukon River. :-)
Yesterday, I wrote this description for a book coming out of me, Grandfossil’s Tales to His Grandchildren. The chapters can be read at grandfossil.blogspot.com. When the book is completed, it will be a free read at archive.org, which has a number of my non-fiction books and three of my novels, all of which might be viewed as stranger than fiction by some people :-).*********************
Ok, younguns. Confession time. I went back to 1994 to hijack the title of this unfolding book from the husband of my oldest daughter, who called me after their first child was born and asked me what I wanted my grandchildren to call me? I said, “Grandfossil,” and that stuck.
Confession time again. I hijacked the title of this book from the Eurasian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s 2nd book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandchildren, in which Gurdjieff is Beelzebub recounting for members of his spiritual movement how he matured from being not so smart and wise and what he learned along the way and what they might wish to take from it and use for themselves.
One of my best college friends went to work for the New York Environmental Agency in Albany, New York and his first assignment was to clean up the Love Canal, which was a chemical waste dump. After some years, he was running that agency. After 20 years, he retired and went to work for the United States Environmental Protection agency in Washington, D.C.
One day, he told me that he was the guy who decided what chemicals farmers put on the foods I ate. He retired from that job and went to work for a company that was trying to raise awareness for the environment in America. He told me they had concluded that most adults were impossible to reach, so they were going into lower, middle and high schools, hoping to reach children.
So, yes, I hijacked his environmental company, too, because the spiritual food every person has to deal with, one way or another, consciously or consciously, is the social, religious and political pollution of themselves and the human species, which process Gurdujieff called “The Work”, which I came to be involved in in my 45th year, not because I was smart or devout, but because I was totally desperate, out of bright ideas, and felt I had failed in every way a man could fail.
In that wretched state, I prayed one morning in early January 1987, “Dear God, I do not wish to die like this, failed. I offer my life to human service.” About ten days passed. I woke in the wee hours, maybe 2 a.m., and saw two white, shift-shaped beings hovering above me in the darkness. I figured they were angels. I heard, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you.” I remembered the prayer I had made and saw a white flash and was jolted by something electrical. That happened two more times. The beings faded out. The time elapsed was about 10 seconds. My body was shaking and sweating.
Slowly, in phases, I was turned upside down and inside out and every which-a-way but loose. I was stood before endless mirrors looking at myself. Some of it was wonderful, sublime. A lot of it was horrible. My way of thinking, feeling, and perceiving myself and people and the world around me completely changed. If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone. It helps to know it happened to others.
Sloan Bashinsky
March 2, 2024
Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Elizabeth RoWell, this is amazing because what you said about Kali makes sense now in that she brings significant change and is seen as evil. I thought instantly of Beelzebub when you shared your book title. I love that. And yes, people have a hard time moving into their own experience and becoming Witnesses themselves. Thank you for this. I am truly amazed at the Kali reference and how it ties in to transformation and change. I’ll be looking more into that!Sloan Bashinsky
In 2002, I did two soul drawings of Kali, and she was beautiful, blond in one drawing, red-headed in another, and yet when sometimes I dreamed of her, I felt like I had been spanked for trampling the feminine in something going on in my waking life. I came to view her as the Hindu version of Jesus in the Gospels, death and resurrection, so to speak, but in the soul sense.
Elizabeth Ro
I get it. I will need to read up on her now. My thoughts go to Lilith (see Talk Lilith to Me) and Mary the mother of Jesus. This is a new dig for me and I am grateful you brought this up. 🙏
Sloan Bashinsky
I don’t know what you might find written about Kali. My experiences with her, thus my take on her, are from my own experiences with her, and that India art of her seems to speak for itself.
My younger daughter had a pet ball python she named Lilith. I don’t know much about Lilith, either.
My take on Eve is she did precisely what God designed her to do, and then she caught bloody hell for it from the religious pundits, who did not understand, for how could people really know God, who had not experienced being absent from God?
Perhaps my view of Eve explains why I was not drawn to Lilith.
I was drawn to Magdalene, who clearly in the Gospels was Jesus’s mate- O Lord, I could not help saying again, if she washed his feet with her hair and tears, and then anointed his feet with precious oil she scarce could afford, what did she wash and anoint him with when they were in private?
Why did Jesus send Magdalene to the men disciples in hiding after the crucifixion, to tell them she had seen him and he would be with them soon? Unless, to tell them that she stuck with him and they fled, and she was really important to him.
At Petentcost, the men disciples received the Holy Spirit, the female side of God, not recognized by Christendom, but recognized in Judaism as Shekinah. Up to then, the men were still little boys, quarreling among themselves, not getting what Jeuss had taught them. Shekinah activated in them the seeds Jesus had planted and grew them into men God could use.
Same happened for women Jesus knew, who are not recognized as disciples by Christendom. Same happened later to women and men in Christendom, some of whom the Church recognized as saints, some were not.
Should I suppose you have read Holy Blood Holy Grail, about Jesus and Magdalene’s bloodline, whose carriers even today do not feel like they are from this planet, but they are stuck here for a while?
Jesus in the Gospels taught a way of thinking and living that would have changed humanity completely, if it had taken hold generally.
I think Kali is kinda like that in Hinduism. Although I don’t know if that is how Hindus view her, I met a Hindu man in Key West, who was a devote of Kali, and I watched her deal with him, and he knew it was her, when he strayed away from her, and it wasn’t pretty.
Maybe instead of reading up on Kali, you just go about your life and see if she shows up?
Maybe she sent you to Yukon Alaska? :-)
Elizabeth Ro
You pointed me a direction and I appreciate it. Thanks a bunch.You pointed me a direction and I appreciate it. Thanks a bunch.
Sloan Bashinsky
I think you might wish to reconsider your position on Lucifer, which I think I suggested once before to you? I’ve had lots of dealings with that realm, and it’s very real and it’s very tricky. In the fall 1995, I was told in my sleep, it is very easy to mistake Lucifer for The Holy Spirit. And then I spent a long time learning why I was told that, and it was not pretty, and it was really difficult, and I remain even now ever concerned I am at risk to it, if I am not very careful.
Elizabeth Ro
This is the type of conversation that needs to be had over a period of time to better unfold all the layers of learning you and I have been through and where they come in and out. I have heard that about the HS as well. Thank you so much! This is opening a whole area of study for me. So grateful!
Sloan Bashinsky
Perhaps you keep doing what you are doing in Alaska, including your writings, and you wait on the Spirit to steer you regarding further study? Each day brings plenty to fuel each person’s walk with God by whatever named called, and I think that was Jesus’s main point in the Gospels, and the main point of other advanced human beings on this world, who share their views and thoughts with people around them. Based on my dealings with Kali, that is how she “teaches” me, when the mood strikes her :-). I probably should be grateful she did not cut off my stupid man head a few times :-)
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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