Crone on the Hill

Years ago I used to travel around a lot. Not in the trust fund kid kind of way with the hiking across Europe and such, more in the hitch-hiking and sleeping on the side of the road kind of way. In those days there were ways one could travel on a budget quite easily, it was all a matter of approach. For me, it was a lifestyle, I found ways to stay on the road. I could read palms or tarot cards or sell anything from stickers to grilled cheese depending on the venue. Grateful dead shows alone kept me in funds all year round. I got by quite nicely and even. I was able to travel all over the United States and got to meet people who lived right on the outskirts of normal. All this and I also lived a life that didn't include bills, insurance, car payments, rent, house payments or any of those other money sucking voids.

It came to be that I found myself in Colorado with some folks who were involved politically in much the same movements I was involved with. I was invited to stay for awhile as there were some events coming up and I could be of help organizing and such. As it turned out there was some land not too far outside of the town of Manitou Springs where there was a makeshift tent-city environment going on for people helping out. For a short while I stayed in my tent but eventually, the man who owned the land wanted to put up a few tepee's and had decided to offer one of them to me. The weather was getting colder and I would be staying longer while a good number of folks from tent city would be leaving to go back home to their "real" lives.

By the time the dust settled there were three tepee's, one occupied by me, one vacant and one occupied only for a short while by a family of five who ended up leaving before the cold set in. There was also the small cabin at the top of the hill and its rather odd occupant, but more on her later. A lot more goes into the setting up of a teepee than most people would think. The door has to face the right direction, the lining has to be just right and among other things the fire-pit has to be properly placed or the smoke won't exit the tepee. By the end of the day there had been a full on blessing for all the tepee's set up that day, all done traditionally by our neighbors who were Native to the land, part of the Ute Nation if memory serves. My tepee was set at the bottom of a hill, it was amazing, when I opened the door flap my view was Pikes Peak. It was glorious and peaceful after months of being on the dusty road.

As to the cabin on the property, when I say it was small, I mean it was very small. It was the only structure that was already on the land when the man bought it. It was just one room. There was a wood-burning stove, a make-shift sink with a pump for well water but no traditional faucet. There was a small bed and a table and a couple of chairs. There was no electricity and it all could have been quite cozy were it not for its rather strange occupant. Being a lover of nature myself and making frequent trips alone into the wilderness to camp for extended periods of time I never would have thought a person could be in the woods alone for too long. Jane proved me wrong.

From the time I had initially pitched my little pup tent when I first arrived I had been hearing stories of Jane the Crone. She was a good deal older than the rest of us and came off all peace and love but there was something a little creepy about her too. She had one of those smiles that was "too big." She would bare all her teeth, her lips stretching eerily too far over them and her eyes would get just a bit too big and round. From what I had been told she had been very different when she first moved into the cabin, just an eccentric artsy type. Now the rumors were that she was a witch and was quite adept at casting her spells and wreaking havoc if she felt like it. Of course as an herbalist I had stayed in certain smallish towns long enough to develop the same type of reputation just for making herbal remedies for common ailments, so I took it all with a grain of salt.

She was so zealous in her practice as a witch and spent so much time all alone in that tiny cabin in the woods that some folks thought the isolation was what had made her crazy. Others thought the cabin was haunted and she was the worse for it. I chose to simply think of her as eccentric. I heard she had been a semi-successful artist for a short while decades in the past and that she had been engaged but it somehow hadn't worked out in her favor. There were a myriad of tragic stories that surrounded her, all meant to explain why she had lost her mind or at least a substantial part of it. I had been there long enough to have felt a strange vibe coming from the cabin on the hill and just minded my own business. As it turned out the man who owned the land was sort of protective of her for reasons we could only guess at, at any rate, we all just steered clear.

By the time the cold was settling in most of the people from tent city were gone so rides into town weren't as easy to come by as they had been when the weather was more agreeable. Since my tepee had just gone up I wanted to get a few supplies but it didn't seem like it was going to happen that day as no one was around. I knew if I hiked the nine miles down to the main road I could hitch a ride and started to prepare for the hike. As I was exiting my tepee I sort of threw the flap open and there stood Jane the Crone. "You need a ride to town." She wasn't asking me, she was telling me. "I'm going, you can come with." I wasn't about to turn down a ride so I got into her little pickup truck, the kind with a tiny Japanese engine. She had painted it over and over, coat upon coat with varied colors of spray-paint. There was no pattern and the effect was an explosion at a crayon factory, a sort of rainbow camouflage vomit effect.

Once we got into Manitou Springs Jane the Crone sort of morphed into just Jane. She was acting very differently than she had when we were up on the land, she was almost social. Now that she was talking however, I got an idea of just how delusional she was. Her persona became that of the tragic lamenting artist whom everyone was living to please. She acted as though we, meaning everyone around, should accept that to do her bidding without complaint was an honor of some kind. She had an air of eccentricity just like she did on the mountain but in this environment it seemed forced and very unlike the eccentricity she displayed in the mountains where she hung out around her fire-pit chanting and mumbling to unseen forces. She kept smiling her giant smile and her eyes had the look of a person who could snap at any moment.

I was bidding her farewell and thanking her for the ride and as I started to calculate how much time I had based on the inevitable hike back up the mountain, out of nowhere she clasped her hand around my elbow. It was weird, it was right out of a creepy movie. It shouldn't have been such a bony hand, she shouldn't have had so much strength, her face shouldn't have seemed so gaunt and when she spoke her voice shouldn't have sounded so deadpan. "You'll come with me." She said, and then her entire persona changed yet again, she looked me in the eyes for the first time I think, and said, "I can't bear the thought of being on my own in town, please come to my storage unit with me?" I don't know what compelled me to do so but I got back into her truck, I wanted to help her.

Her storage unit was interesting to say the least, it wasn't a commercial storage facility, it was an outbuilding with corrugated white plastic walls and a tin roof. The space itself was pretty big. I could hear birds roosting above us, traffic in the distance and the sun came in through the corrugated plastic, yellowed with age, giving everything a sort of yellow muddy hue like in an old photograph. It leant a timelessness to the place that was kind of eerie. She had her things spread out on tables, some was in boxes, some wasn't and there were paintings leaning against every wall. Some were landscapes, beautiful paintings of the mountains. She had actually captured the beauty of the mountains as well as the danger in them in almost perfect balance which was quite impressive. There was also some darker imagery, like a descent into the dark and twisted. All of them were well done and I felt kind of lucky that I got to see them.

Jane became the artist again here in this place surrounded by her things. There were racks of vintage clothing, she said she just loved vintage clothing. She haphazardly threw a scarf around her head Edie Beale style and started sauntering around telling me to move things from the left side of the room to the right side for no apparent reason. I played along, experiences like this were in the top three reasons I lived the lifestyle I did. She put a beaded necklace around my neck mumbling something about where she got it and how it looked great on me and I should keep it. A couple of people stopped by, they seemed to come out of no-where, as though they too had one of these feeble out-buildings and they lived in their little shack full time and had been close by, watching and waiting. They all threw off the elderly eccentric artist stereotype and I wondered if they were all that was left of some artists colony from the sixties. Maybe the ones who had taken a little too much of this or that back in their heyday.

It was an odd sensation hanging out with Jane. It was as though she lived in an alternate universe and when you were with her so did you. One foot in this world and one foot in the ether, or rather other. It was like a lucid dream only rather than 90% dream and 10% real it was closer to 50/50 and I was rather enjoying the strange. Eventually it was time to get back to the land however so we climbed into the truck to head back. I put the things she wanted into the back of the truck and we sped off. On the way up the hill we made a few stops so Jane could drop off what she called her "potions, lotions and notions." Soon we were heading up into the forest and Jane thanked me for going with her. When we got to the land no one was there. The sun was getting ready to set and I wanted to get my fire-pit ready for its virgin burn.

I dropped my bags off in my tepee and flung the flap open and Judith was standing there. "This is the best part of the day," she said. "The sun is not up nor is it down. I want to bless your new home!" She said this then ducked in to enter carrying candles and two small bottles. It was clear where I had prepared for my fire-pit, I had been looking forward to my first burn in it for some time. Jane walked over to the pit and knelt next to it. I just stood there, she hadn't said to join her or not so I didn't know what to do. I had seen a lot in my days even back then but this was weird since she kept her back to me. After she did her thing she summoned me over to kneel by the fire pit with her. She put my hand in the thus far un-used fire-pit and then covered my hand with her own. She mumbled something and then started telling me she felt like a mother to me. "That's great." I said, "Thanks." and with that I started the fire. Jane hung out for a little while then quietly left. She flung open the door then turned back to me before leaving and said, "Mind the wind, girl, mind the wind."

Her statement didn't really phase me, I had done my research, you do have to be careful in a tepee about the wind and making certain your flaps are in the right position, if they aren't the tepee will fill up with smoke. I knew what to do, I would be fine. I had some alone time, let the day go and went to bed. Sometime during the night I woke up to the tepee being filled with smoke, I was choking on it. I checked the flaps and flung open the door, the moonlight outside was so bright it was like daylight. I stepped out to catch my breath and looked up the hill in the direction of the moonlight and there, reflected as a black silhouette against the full moon, I saw Jane the Crone standing there, glaring at me. I sort of half waved and headed back in and lit a candle. There was no smoke or smoke residue in the tepee and when I checked the fire the coals were ice cold. There is no way the tepee had been filled with smoke since there was no smoke to fill it. I felt really tired all of the sudden and despite feeling the urge to light a little sage and maybe spread a bit of black salt I just went to bed.

I spent the next three days violently ill. No one was around other than the crone and myself. I was feverish and drifted in and out of places I didn't even know were there. At one point, on the third night, I went outside to get some fresh air during one of my seemingly more lucid periods and as I stood outside the wind kicked up and I looked up at what was left of the waning moon. My eyes were led to the hillside and the seemingly maniacal grin pasted on the crones face. More than likely it was the lack of adequate food and water in my system at that point but she looked really scary at that point and the day I had spent with her went through my head in fast forward.

I remembered what I had seen in some of those darker themed paintings at her storage unit, the multiple personalities that kept popping up, her general disassociation from anything resembling reality, part of which I enjoyed but part of which rather frightened me now. Here I was, all alone in the Colorado wilderness with a woman who had multiple personalities and was delusional to boot. Who knew what someone like that was capable of. Not to mention the land was atop an old mine, she could kill me and stuff whatever she didn't eat into a mine-shaft never to be found. I was put off to say the least.

The things that struck me in that moment, under the moonlight, were the things I didn't think of at the time. The necklace she had unceremoniously draped around my neck, the way she placed our hands in the fire-pit before that first time lighting it. I wondered what she had said, what her intentions were. I had been around and was not new to the ideas alternative religio-spiritual values can entail. I had met many self-proclaimed witches and wiccan types and as a rootworker myself had met via shared interest a good number of voodoo practitioners. It seemed that my previous experience coupled with the moment of clarity I was having in the pale moonlight enforced that what she had done earlier was some sort of a blessing. Standing there now and looking up into her huge blank eyes I wondered if it had been a curse.

I went back into my tepee and headed straight for the fire-pit. I cleaned out all the ashes from that first burn and took them outside and dumped them, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Then I kneeled next to the cleaned up fire-pit and put my hand in it the way Jane had put hers and mine in earlier and I said, "whatever was done, I'm undoing it now." I tugged at the beaded necklace Jane had given me breaking the knot and threw it into the pit as well then I lit a new fire and went to adjust the flaps as the wind seemed to be picking up again. When I stepped outside to adjust the flaps I looked up the hill but Jane was nowhere in sight. A cloud had passed over the moon and things had gone quite dark. I have to admit, while I felt better, that darkness coming from the direction of Judith's cabin was very unsettling, not to mention, I was beginning to feel a little woozy. I looked up and Jane was standing directly in front of me, inches from me with that eerie smile plastered across her pale face. Then I heard the hoof beats.

From further down the hill something was coming up the mountainside, a shadow. I stood there in front of my tepee just watching, not wanting to move. Then several horses came, there were riders on them though at first I couldn't make out who they were. As they got closer I saw the first rider, he looked much like the Ute that had put up and blessed the tepee I was living in but it made no sense for him to be there. Of course, none of what was happening in that moment made sense. At any rate, the riders, whom I could clearly see now as Ute warriors, rode swiftly past me seeming to push the dark shadow that had been ascending down the hill from Jane's place back up it. I just stood there, I wish I could see what my face must have looked like at that moment. There was fear, relief, awe and other emotions all running through me at once, it was pretty crazy. Jane got pushed back up the hill too as though she were an apparition, she just dissipated before my eyes. At that point I felt only exhaustion, I went back into my tepee and slept like a wee baby.

Usually, living in the tepee and without electricity, it was the sun that woke me up but on the morning after the riders came I slept until almost 10am. When I woke up I felt really good. It was as though the last three days of being ill had never happened, I didn't even feel weak. This time when I flung open the tepee door all I saw was Pikes Peak. I stepped out of the tepee and looked up the hill, there was no sign of Jane. I stayed for another three months and didn't see much of her the whole time. When I did see her she somehow seemed smaller. I still do wonder though from time to time what it all meant. I have my theories and speculation as to the why. I like to give Jane the benefit of the doubt and just chalk it up to weird but there will always be a part of me that wonders if maybe she was trying to hurt me somehow and used some sort of curse to do it. Was it the blessing the Ute put on the tepee that protected me that night or was it the measures I had taken in lucid moments? Was it both? Either way, Jane, lets never meet again.

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