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The Knock on the Door

Writer's picture: Cliff DansaCliff Dansa

Updated: Jul 23, 2021

It was a little before noon on a hot dry dusty day as I was walking out to the highway. It was 1977 and I was twenty-one years old. Just a few months earlier, I had been driving a delivery truck through suburban northern California and I’d spent the summer backpacking and hitch-hiking around the northwest. A few days earlier, while I was hitchhiking through northern Idaho, I’d met a guy who talked about picking apples and it sounded interesting, so I headed for Wenatchee, which is where he said he was going. I had gotten a ride with someone on their way to pick apples in Brewster, so I ended up in Brewster Washington, an apple town with a three-block business district surrounded by dry sage brush hills, right on the Columbia river, which provided the water for the orchards.


My ride and I had camped in the hills outside of town and then come into town in the morning. The sidewalks in town were crawling with a scruffy assortment of hippie types, biker types, old wino types, a motley crew that was gathering for the apple harvest. I had been keeping myself pretty clean cut while I was hitch-hiking and I felt a little out of place. Strangers were walking up to strangers, “Hey, do you know where I can find a job picking apples?” “No, I was going to ask you the same question.” I wasn’t quite sure what to do.


I found a gentle old hippie who had done this for years hanging out on the tailgate of his truck. He told me, “Look, it’s early. Almost nobody has started yet. If you’re not that worried about how much money you make, just head off for three or four days and then come back. By then everybody will have started and there’ll be plenty of work.” I decided to take his advice, to head up into the North Cascades for a few days and then come back. As I walked out to the road, there was only one thing that was bothering me about this apple picking idea. Everyone that I’d talked to had said that I would never get hired if I said that I hadn’t picked before. Their advice to me was to lie, to say that I had experience, and to get fired from my first two or three jobs until I got it figured out. I wasn’t quite comfortable with that; I’ve always tended to be something of a compulsive truth-teller, but I figured that it would work itself out when the time came.


I got to the highway, set my guitar down on the pavement, and leaned my backpack against a highway sign. I’d barely stuck out my thumb when a red pickup truck pulled over. I threw my backpack and guitar into the back and climbed in.


“How far are you going?” I asked.

“Oh, not far. You looking for work?”

“Might be.”

“I got a job picking apples.”

“Yeah, I’d be interested in that.”

“You ever picked before?”

“Uh, no.”

“That’s OK, we’ll show you how.”


*****


Five weeks later, I was sitting on a rock beneath a quarter moon with a cool desert breeze rippling through the sage brush. I could see eight, maybe ten campfires scattered around the little valley below me, see shadowy images of people gathered round the fires, and hear a ripple of conversation, laughter, and music echoing up into the night. Old time fiddle tunes were floating up from one of the campfires and those guys were sounding pretty good. Behind me was the main part of the Barter Fair, a loosely organized gathering of a couple thousand hippie types to celebrate the end of the apple harvest.


I’d spent the last hour or so wandering the main part of the fair, going from campfire to campfire, mostly listening to music. At one campfire, a girl with a classical guitar and a gentle soprano had been singing Joni Mitchell, at the next, a bunch of bikers were passing a bottle of Jack Daniels while one of them banged on a steel string and they all sang, “Big boss man, don’t you hear me when I call?” A little further down the line, there was a huge drum jam. After a while, I wandered away from the main part of the fair to be with myself and the night and found myself on this rock.


The fiddle tunes had stopped for a few minutes when I heard a voice come drifting up out of the valley, a voice like I’d never heard before. It was eerie and ghostly, acapella, with strange resonances as it echoed up out of the valley. I knew the song, but I’d never heard it like this before.


Yonder stands little Maggie, with a dram glass in her right hand. She’s drinking away all her troubles and courting some other man.


The way the sound was echoing off the sides of the valley, I had no idea where this voice was coming from and no idea what it was, but it was calling me. I started down the slope into the valley.


A half hour later, I found myself at the campfire of the old-time fiddlers, two of them, who were ripping up Old Joe Clark for an audience of about a dozen people. The tune finally wound down and there was a smattering of applause. The fiddlers laughed, hugged each other breathlessly, and sat down. Everyone just hung out for a while, gazing into the fire, until another guy, not one of the fiddlers, said, “Maybe I’ll do one.” He pulled an open-back banjo out of a case and stood up, but instead of playing it in the usual way, he held the resonator in front of his face and started singing into the back of the banjo.


The higher up the tree you go, the riper grow the cherries, The more you hug and kiss them girls, the sooner they’ll get married. I’m going across the sea, I’m going across the sea, I won’t give a damn for no damn girl, don’t give a damn for me.


Immediately, I knew that that was the sound I had heard from up on the ridge. The sound of his voice resonating the banjo head, the strings vibrating sympathetically, the wind through the trees and the high desert night, it all went right into my heart and touched something deep, something old, something longing to come out. There was a gentle knock on the door.


*********


A year later, I found myself driving my newly acquired Volkswagen van down a winding road with my friend Clyde sitting beside me. Clyde and I had met the year before when we shared a small cabin with two other apple pickers, had reconnected this year, and had just finished four weeks of picking. We were planning to look around to find some more work in the orchards that were still picking, maybe go up north, but first, we’d decided to drive up to try to connect with an old friend of Clyde’s named Albert who was supposed to be working at an orchard up the Methow River. Through our conversations around the campfire, Clyde and I had figured out that Albert was the guy I had heard singing into the back of a banjo the year before and I was anxious to meet him. We had found the orchard only to have the owner tell us, “You just missed him. Everyone left this morning.” So now, somewhat disappointed, we were driving back down to the main highway that follows the Columbia river.


When we got to the highway, as I stopped at the stop sign, looking both ways for a break in the traffic, I noticed two guys hitchhiking on the other side of the road. Just as I was thinking, “We’re not going very far, but we probably have room for them in the back, Clyde cried out, “It’s Albert!” I made the turn and pulled off of the side of the road, Clyde popped out of the passenger door and hollered, “Albert!” One of the hitchhikers jumped up, arms open wide, and ran up to Clyde, the two of them laughing and hugging each other, finally falling on the ground and wrestling like a couple of puppies.


Albert was like no one I’d ever met. He was the first person I met who recognized and was interested in the shamanic aspects of music. Even though he was hitchhiking around, he carried a banjo with him although he didn’t really play it. He just loved the sound of singing into the back of it. He was an amazing harmonica player and had a small collection of portable but interesting percussion instruments that he liked to play.


A couple days later, we were camped in the hills above Brewster after spending the day unsuccessfully looking for work. It was evening, Clyde and I were preparing dinner on the Coleman stove, and the crickets and other night creatures were just starting to sing. Albert walked over to the edge of our campsite with his caxixi—small shakers indigenous to Brazil—and started to play them to the rhythm of the crickets. After a while he started to sing. The rhythms of the caxixi were blending with the sounds of the crickets while his vocal lines floated over the top. It was a beautiful spontaneous musical composition for caxixi, voice, and crickets, but I could tell that it was also a conversation. I didn’t quite understand what was going on, but I was attracted to it. At the same time, it felt inaccessible, beyond my reach, like Albert was born with some special power that I didn’t have. The knock on the door was getting louder.


*****


Nine months later, it was 1979 and I was twenty-three. I had worked from December through June planting trees and had saved some money. Because trees need to be planted when they’re dormant, summer is off-season for tree-planting. I had some time, so I decided to take a bicycle trip through Ireland. Several of my friends in Washington, when they heard I was going to Ireland, had told me, “You need to look up Dan Hummel.” Dan was a guy I had met once, in a bar at a table with roughly ten people sitting at it, and I was pretty sure he would have no memory of me. Nevertheless, about a month into my Ireland trip, I found myself pedaling up the hill out of Bantry town to go try to find him. The directions I had been given were basically, “Head out on the peninsula west of Bantry and start asking around,” which didn’t sound too promising, but I figured, “What the hell, if nothing else, I can see another part of Ireland.” As I rode up the hill, I noticed a guy hitchhiking in the other direction and something looked vaguely familiar, so I turned my bike around, rode up to the guy and asked, “Are you Dan Hummel?” He gave me a quizzical look and said, “Yeah, who are you?”


We camped that night on a beautiful five-acre piece of land that he had bought, planning to build a little traditional Irish style stone cottage. The next morning, Dan suggested that we go for a walk. I stuffed my pennywhistle in my pocket as I watched him throw some snacks, a water bottle, and a camera into a small backpack. The pennywhistle was a new instrument for me, something I was trying to learn on this trip through Ireland. I wasn’t great, but I was starting to get a feel for it. Just as it looked like we were about ready to go, Dan pulled out a pipe. He had managed to bring some marijuana into the country. Sure, why not? Dan and I passed the pipe and he started leading us up the little stream that flowed down the hillside onto his property.


When seen up close, the streams that tumble down the Irish hillsides create amazing little mini-landscapes, little waterfalls over mossy rocks, surrounded by ferns, purple heather, yellow scotch broom, magical little landscapes which, I quickly learned, Dan loved to photograph. He would walk a little until he came to one of those amazing little places in the stream and then stop to photograph it. Stopping with him while he was taking his photographs, I started looking more deeply at these places and appreciating their beauty. I started to feel what can only be described as an energy in these places, an energy that if you were going to make up stories to describe it, would be personified by leprechauns, fairies, and similar creatures.


Remembering Albert talking to the night spirits with his caxixi, I let Dan go on ahead, pulled out my whistle, and tentatively began to play. I let the energy of the place come into me and affect my playing; I let my playing speak to the energy of the place. I could feel a dialog taking place, something in the relationship between the music and the place that I had never experienced. My rational brain didn’t quite want to accept it, but I figured, “Hey, I’m stoned so let’s just go with it.” I let myself play with each place until I felt complete with it, then I’d move on up the stream to find another. I spent a delightful couple of hours until Dan came trudging back down the mountain, gave me a wink, and we went back down the hill to make lunch.


We repeated this game four or five times over the next few days. These walks were one of his favorite things to do and, once I had found my way to play the game, became a favorite of mine as well. After a few days, we decided to go our separate ways and parted amicably.


A few days later, I found myself approaching another stream in the next county on a gray Irish morning with an intermittent misty rain and clouds hanging low so you couldn’t see the tops of the hills. The other guys who had been staying in the hostel the night before—a couple Norwegian students, an Israeli army vet, and an engineer from Dublin—were already hiking up the trail to the top of what the Irish refer to as mountain, but with the weather like this, I knew that it would be socked in by clouds and I had other ideas. I’d stayed in the hostel until after they’d left, then headed out on my own. I’d followed the trail for a while as it climbed the ridge towards the top of the mountain, but then I’d left the trail and started climbing down the slope to the stream flowing through the valley.


I knew that I wanted to try to play the same game I had been playing with Dan, except that now, Dan was gone, there was no marijuana, and I was going to have to do this straight. I could feel myself drawn like a magnet towards the stream, but I could also feel the knots in my stomach and hear the argument going on in my head, “This is crazy. There’s no such thing as spirits of the stream. You were just stoned. Who do you think you are?” I got to the stream and followed it a short distance until I found a magical little place. I looked up at the heather covered hills around me, assuring myself that no one was around, and nervously pulled out my whistle. I looked up the hill again and assured myself that the trail was way up there, that no one was going to see me and if they did manage to hear me, they would be far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to identify where the sound was coming from. I assured myself that it was OK for me to risk making a fool of myself, and I started to play.


Slowly, I let go of my nervousness and allowed the energy of the place to move through me. I answered that energy with the sound of the whistle and felt the dialog taking place. I was able to have more or less the same relationship with the energies of the stream that I had had with the streams I visited when I was with Dan. Only this time, I wasn’t stoned, I couldn’t dismiss the experience. I played for an hour or so until the rain got heavier, and I decided to go back to the hostel. I walked back feeling blessed by this interaction with the spirits, incredulous that I had actually been able to have this experience without herbal assistance, but at the same time hearing my head full of that critical chatter, “You’re crazy. You’re just making this up. Who do you think you are?”


A few hours later, I was sitting at a table eating dinner with the other guys who were staying at the hostel, including the engineer from Dublin who was the embodiment of the overly intellectual geek, the type we tend to describe using words like “Asperger’s Syndrome” or “high-functioning autistic,” a guy who tended to make awkward comments that were complete tangents to the conversation going on, about as un-hip a guy as you would ever want to meet. As we were all sitting around the table, eating together, he looked at me and said, “I saw you today.”


“Uh, yeah?” I replied, feeling a mild sense of panic.

“You were playing your penny-whistle.” I felt my stomach drop into my shoes. “What I really liked was how your playing really captured the energy of the place, it was like you were talking to the spirits or something.”


I sat there speechless. Messengers from God come in many forms.


The door was opening, slowly at this point, but it was opening.

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1 Comment


mer
Aug 21, 2021

Bravo! And so wonderful to have that perfectly placed reflection arise from the most unlikely of people.

So fun to learn about your journey!

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