On the road up to Lake Mendocino I had no idea what I would be going to but I trusted that Bob-O knew the area well enough. I hadn’t figured that the Lake was nothing more than a small reservoir. We got a ride to the Highway 20 junction and walked the rest of the way up from 101 to a camp ground on a peninsula overlooking the lake. It wasn’t such a bad spot but it was closed until spring. “Camp Grounds Closed. No Camping!” signs were posted everywhere but that didn’t seem to bother Bob-O. I didn’t like the looks of the camp grounds. Like a lot of California camp grounds it was more of a parking lot than anywhere I’d want to pitch a tent.“We can probably get by with camping here tonight but I doubt we can get by with it for very much longer.” I complained despondently as we put up a tarp over a picnic table under a steady drizzle from an oppressively gray sky.
“No one comes around here for days at a time.” Bob-O assured me.
We gathered up what dry twigs we could find and waited until dark to light a small fire under the end of the tarp stretched over the table. It made for a cozy little camp. We’d panhandled up enough for some beans and hot dogs before leaving Berkeley and we put them together in a pie-pan we’d found in the trash. Cooking them over the small fire for a hot meal under our tarp I was reminded of better days in the A-frame in New Mexico. We settled in for the night.
“I get up in places like this and I start thinking about my life… do you ever do that, Bob-O?”
“Naw, can’t say as I have.”
“You ever think about God?”
“My mom was a Captain in the Salvation Army in Seattle.” Bob-O sounded annoyed.
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of any kind of churchy God.”
“Oh then, I met Jesus at this very same camp-ground once.”
“People tell me that and I don’t know whether to believe them or not.”
“Well, you can believe me. I saw him.”
I thought about the guy in jail with his story of Jesus on a railway trestle. Bob-O was a pretty strange character but I was getting used to strange, strange wasn’t so strange after so much of it and I was seeing and hearing so much strangeness that I was damned near drowning in it.
“So, tell me, what happened, Bob-O.” I was just a little sarcastic at this point.
“I was up here kickin’ back with a bag of glue. I was trippin’ heavy and he was standing right in front of me. He reached out his hand.”
“How did you know it was Jesus?”
“He had holes in his hands and there was blood.”
“Maybe I should rephrase my question: Do you believe there is something, a vibration of collective energy behind all this?” I waved my hand in the dark over my head thinking that perhaps Bob-O might not be as delusional as a jailhouse wino.
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