I was with a group that was apparently studying the area. We
hiked and hiked up this mountain and the trees kept getting bigger and bigger,
the cathedral-like canopy getting higher and darker. The trees were the size of
skyscrapers and all over the ground there were these odd, iridescent mushrooms
with heads like mouths. Mouths that could speak and were saying something you
could hear if you knelt down close enough—familiar poetic sentences like “April
is the cruelest month,” “do not go gently into that dark night,” “The fool doth think he is wise,
but the wise man knows himself to be a fool…” in strange
squeaky voices. And the trees were not all alike, you could sense that they
were individuals with unique personalities looking down from above. The group
of guys, hippie-looking guys, started to discuss the fungus and one of them
said “it was the Sixties, they were love children, of course they would leave
behind poetry-speaking mushrooms” and another person said “…should we try to
eat one?”
This is where I parted from the group and began my own
wandering. I touched a lot of the trees and found a pathway down one slope of
the mountain. Halfway down I found a huge outside office where desks had been
set up in rows but were overgrown with moss and choked with weeds, but there
were women wearing 1950s fashion—long tight skirts, white blouses, hair pulled
back and clipped in the middle—and smoking cigarettes beside warm, incandescent
lights. They had found a bunch of documents, love letters, poems, and things
literary that they were all going through, reading out loud to one another and
laughing about. And again, someone said “it was the Sixties, they were in love,
it was a different time.” None of them paid any attention to me as I passed and
then I was at the bottom of the hillside, at the start of the path I’d been
following—there was an enormous white, parachute-looking thing that fluttered
lightly in the wind, at least 5 stories tall, and which I assumed was a portal.
It was a full moon out and I gazed at it for a long while until I decided it
was time to go. When I looked back at the “hippie forest” it was only like huge
shadow beyond the white portal.