CHAPTER 18 - "Howard Who Fixed Violins" | Around the Cosmic Campfire by Toni Wright

Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright

Chapter 18: Howard, Who Fixed Violins

It was in the summer of 1996 when I went to the Star Knowledge Conference in Wagoner, South Dakota, to hear talks by the Hopies and other Native American tribes. Their mission was to tell white men that they should know about other life forms in the universe and the star messages being given to them. It was quite extraordinary for the Native Americans to give white men any information in these times, or even really, due to the history between our contrasting cultures of people, politics, and religion. The red man had not gotten many fair shakes down through history and had obviously grown to have little, if any, trust in the rest of this country and its peoples. But this event was being sponsored by a collection of various tribes of Native Americans against all odds, and it somehow called to me in some tantalizing way I could not explain.

I had no idea how I would pull it off once the idea was presented to me that I needed to attend, but I just rested with it and let it sink in. I only had a two-day notice. I was to fly from Nashville, according to my grown son, Russ, who had popped into our place in the woods with his friend Steve, who was a shaman and brother to an aboriginal tribe in Australia. They were camping out there and visiting me at my wellness retreat and had decided it would be wise of me to go, as they were going to the Star Knowledge Conference for some unique and special information they wanted us all to be a part of—some history in the making. Steve would not sleep in the house and insisted upon sleeping outside on the ground, close to the earth, as his indigenous brothers would do. So I certainly let him. I was afraid he would be eaten up by chiggers or ticks, but left it to the divine order and called it a night.

In the morning, with a quick phone call, I discovered there was a flight available to me at a rate I could afford, with a babysitter in the neighborhood to watch Emily, then 13 years old, when I flew away for two days. At this event, I rarely traveled; I was always home and the financially responsible one. I was a single mom and the payer of all the bills and caregiver of the house and land I had fought for in the divorce. The plan was to have me fly to Omaha from Nashville and meet Russ and Steve at the airport after they had driven the 14 hours there in a broken-down old car that I didn't know would even make it to the gas station at my road. They would be miraculously waiting for me. I was tested in my true faith that they would be there at all, due to their transportation or the airline’s timing being just fine; however, I just went with it. I said to them a few times, “Are you sure? Are you sure you will be waiting there for me?”

I had learned to listen so well now to God’s messages coming through wee voices and guides I heard when I got very quiet, and I knew I was supposed to go and sit in on this wonderful event. I would then consequently just trust. I had always been akin in my soul to the Native American people—almost as my distant brotherhood. I felt that if there were indeed other lifetimes, my last one had probably been as an American Indian, or maybe I had been Annie Oakley. I had no idea. The smell of campfires, my uncanny city-girl fire-building skills, the drumming, the music, the rawhide, the beads, the everything—it was all too familiar. Again, I rested in going to the event for unknown reasons.

The guys left in their old beater of a car. It was still dark out. I spent the day packing and making arrangements, canceling my messages, clients’ appointments, and making any apologies I needed to. Then I drove the hour to the airport and got my flight. At the end of the long day, after the travel fiasco of making the flight and then deplaning, I looked out the airport window. There, on the green, leveling Nebraska grass of the airport lawn, were Steve and Russ. They were stretched out, arms behind their heads as pillows, taking naps in the sun. It was quite funny, actually. When they greeted me, it was almost as if they were saying, “See, we told you, oh ye of little faith, Mom.” They picked me up and packed me into the front seat of the old clunker that had surprisingly made it to Omaha from Nashville. It had no air conditioning, and with the wind beating us at 70 miles an hour, we headed north on the interstate up through Nebraska to South Dakota, sweating like the travel pigs we become. Never mind that the ceiling insulation was falling down on us and that we were all three crunched together in the front seat, enduring each other’s armpits, with the back seat loaded to the gill with camping gear and miscellaneous. We had hours and hours of driving to do.

When we arrived in Wagoner, it was blacker than black and under really big skies. We pitched a tent in a designated tenting area and fell fast into sleep. We had no idea about anything. In the morning, we had to change out of stinky travel clothes and into fresh clothes while still inside the tent, as the mosquitoes were so thick and so huge we were afraid they would actually carry us away. We agreed with what we’d heard: the mosquito was the state bird of South Dakota. We found our conference location, which was in a community college building, lovely enough, with nearly 2,000 people, I would estimate. It was a life-altering experience. Much of what I learned there, when it was such a deep part of me that is more of a knowing now, decades later, than information that I could impart; but the gist of the information was that others who come here from the stars, as declared by the Hopies, are warning us that we need to take action to live more wisely. We need to take care of this planet, be good to each other, and that these are more than likely some final times with life as we know it. The Hopies have always had incredible skills of prophecy, and much is due to the experience they have of privileged information coming to them—secrets from the people of the stars.

I’d always wanted to find my star people. It was some quest I inexplicably had deep within myself for many uncounted years, and finally, at last, on that funny trip through corn and wheat and mosquitoes and falling ceiling insulation, I found some star people. While at the conference, I met a friend of my son’s named Howard. He was a very quiet, very sweet man about my own age, in his forties. He was a gifted luthier and repaired violins in Houston that were sent to him from all over the world. He had the privilege of handling and loving on even Stradivarius violins that came to him, as well as some other lesser-known instruments. He scripted old-world handwriting, which was a nice touch for his business and communicating with clients, and he seemed to me to be a bit otherworldly, or just oddly distant, I could say now. He seemed very alone as well as very lonely. I knew I didn’t want to be an intimate partner with Howard after we met at the event, but hoped he could be a very good friend.

When we departed that Star Knowledge event, we all went our own ways to engage in our own activities and lives. He wrote me several times on parchment paper, and it looked like it had been resurrected from 17th-century England, using beautifully hand-scripted quill and ink printing. It was beautiful. He was incredibly talented and, without a doubt, a very unique person with such a tender soul. Howard had decided to leave Washington state and move where my dear son was living at the time, in Boulder, Colorado. Howard had an old truck that would not make the trip and was having a mechanic friend tear it apart and put it back together again—a larger truck that could haul all of his belongings on a trailer and get to Colorado—but he wanted some company. As it turned out, my daughter and I were going to Washington state to see my aunt in Bellingham. We drove across America with a friend, rented a car in Portland, saw America’s oldest tree somewhere on the way, swapped cars in Seattle, glanced at the Space Needle, and headed to my aunt’s house.

After our visit with Aunt Rosie and Uncle Joe, we drove through the mountains towards Howard’s place in Mazama. The North Cascades were incredible, but secretly I wanted to drive through them with my eyes closed, since the highway felt so treacherous. It was like a carnival ride. The mountains were breathtaking, expansive, steep, and, of course, it was rainy to make it a real white-knuckle drive, but I made it just fine. I had never seen such a heavenly-looking place. There was one piece of information I had not been privy to when considering a layover meeting with Howard at his house and helping him drive to Colorado to meet my son: Howard lived in two fishing barrels. They were commercial fishing barrels that were huge and had been joined together; they were made into a dwelling to live in meagerly, but had a concrete floor, running water, a makeshift kitchen, bathroom, and a sweet little stream running out back with small water life in it. There were guppies and minnows and tadpoles, oh my! I had no idea we were going to be guests in two giant fishing barrels, but as it goes for me, I try to always go with the flow if my plans elude me. There was nothing around where Howard lived—no houses, just a long and fairly quiet highway to nowhere. It was a couple of miles’ walk to a small grocery shop, which was barely a store, more like a little gas station with some unhealthy snacks and amenities, but Emily and I walked a few times for root beer and something else sweet to lessen her pain, as she was in the middle of nowhere with her mom in two fishing barrels. We did a few touristy things for a day or two and river-walked, went horseback riding, and went into Winthrop, a tourist town a long trek away from us, to have dinner, and that was about it.

The plan was for us to drive back to Howard’s with Howard to Russ’s place in Boulder, and Howard would not have to make the drive alone, and Emily and I wouldn’t have to rent a car and drive all the way there to see Russ in Boulder by ourselves either. It seemed like a good plan; however, we waited and waited, and his truck was just not done yet. It was never done. Days went by as my hopes foiled, and his, and his realization that I did not want to become his intimate partner, which, of course, he already knew before arriving. Howard got angry, and it was difficult to make the wait for the road trip. There were many not-good feelings that were abound, and it got worse as he discovered he could not convince me into being his lover. I was actually feeling incredibly uncomfortable between us at a certain point. I kept wondering if men and women can’t just be friends—what’s so difficult about that?

We three were distracted for a few nights in a real while, reclining on sleeping bags out in front of his place, watching strange flying activity in the night sky. It was obvious whatever was flying there just wasn’t from here, in my opinion. Not many crafts that we know of that are made by humans will shoot into view from nowhere, stop in the sky, then resume, go sideways, stop, and go down and shoot out of the atmosphere like a shooting star. We could watch it for hours, night after night, if we wanted to. It became predictable, but it was playful, and certainly it was quite an experience. Whoever these UFOs were, they were quite busy. One day, a car with two passengers lost their brakes and ran across the highway out in front into his yard, missing their stop sign and almost ran directly into the fishing barrels. No one was hurt, but we were really shaken up. Another day, a Pinto carrying eight migrant workers came down the same mountain highway hill, just a mile from his house, and lost control and killed all eight of them across the ridge into the next county. A forest fire was starting, and the air was filling with smoke, and the fire was spreading and migrating towards us. The whole area was on high alert. I wanted to get out of there immediately, as nothing felt quite right from the beginning. My antenna went suddenly really, really up. I asked him to take me to where his truck was being repaired so we could see the progress being made, and that way I would have an idea when he could leave so I could make my way back to work and back to my real world. So he took me over there. The truck in question was in many, many pieces and was months away from being completed, as nearly as I could tell. They did not even have all the needed parts. This he knew, and he had no real plan of leaving in that truck anytime soon. I had no way of getting out of there—no car, no bus, no plane. I knew no one, and at that time I had no cell phone. It was a dilemma, but I was fine, wasn’t I? We were fine. He was not a stranger; he was someone I had met before, and better yet, he was a friend of someone in my family, and I thought he was my friend too, and yet I was secretly getting frightened. My antenna was certainly receiving, and I was beginning to wonder why it didn’t inform me long before now—a month ago would have been nice.

A few more days passed, and I insisted I was leaving. I knew I had to get out of there, and I heard the message from within myself to do so. It was loud and clear. If need be, I would walk to the gas station store and get someone to help me. He insisted he’d take us to the Wenatchee train station, and sorry whether he wanted to or not, he would have to help us out because we had to go. It was an imperative. He was resistant, and he was already quite unfriendly, and I was having such deep feelings of needing to be gone that I could not explain. I explained to him that I was running out of vacation money and needed to work. It was unacceptable that I had been sleeping on the floor—the concrete floor on a thin pad started to feel like it was some kind of punishment by him, and it was all pretty strange. I felt like a captive, or almost like a hostage, and worse and worse yet, I had my daughter with me. It was worse than just a vacation gone awry. I made more calls to Amtrak from the gas station. I found a train that left Wenatchee at six o’clock in the morning for Seattle, albeit the wrong direction. I would take it. I wanted to be gone from here desperately. He grudgingly consented to the drive, and we took his other, more operational truck, loaded with a few of my belongings, Emily and myself, into the night, past Winthrop and on onto the highway towards Wenatchee. It was about one in the morning, and as we got started, Emily noticed a light in the sky over to our left. It was large; it was following us as we made the trip into the sunrise of Wenatchee. The light followed us the whole day. It was not a plane or a helicopter; it was going over the mountains, following us, and stayed with us for hours. Emily, who had been horrified as a girl by the movie *Communion*, was afraid we might get abducted by aliens on the highway and was frantic we would really see a spaceship. She was doubly afraid that Howard’s old truck might collapse on the road in the dark, leaving us easy prey. I kept assuring her we were just fine. We were just fine. I wondered at many points in that journey how I ever got us involved in such a situation. I silently vowed never to do it again. I would never strive for a fun and easy-going road adventure of footloose and fancy-free days with my daughter or anyone else, for that matter, ever again.

The truck did not fail us. The light was still there, following us to the left for all of the hours we were on the road. When daylight was emerging, the light seemed to rise higher and higher in the sky, but I could still see it. Soon it looked like a distant star sitting up there—a faded star in the daylit blue sky. No one else would probably ever notice it. It didn’t look like anything very worldly. Could it have been a planet or a star that our trek on earth was aligned with? I didn’t know, but I felt it watched in some way.

There was no train station at our destination. The Amtrak pickup place was a small, glassed-in shelter with just a single sitting bench. Howard threw our suitcases on the ground and got back to his truck with no goodbyes and left—left us there sitting on the bench alone, waiting for the train. It was like a strange Guy Clark country song. We made our way to Seattle through the mountains on Amtrak. I was so grateful; the sounds of the rails felt like my best friend. We spent the night in a sweet hotel, walked the city, and in the morning re-boarded Amtrak and made our way to Russ and his friends and our joyful retreat in the Rocky Mountains near Golden, Colorado. It was glorious—even bears meandering around the night mountain forest as we slept. The rest of the trip was driving home to Tennessee in a rental car, and my daughter and I were both glad to be back home, back to some sort of sanity in our lives of familiarity. What a relief! The train trip, the Cascades, the Rocky Mountains, the views along the way, the Pacific Ocean, going through the Badlands, glancing at Mount Rushmore, seeing mysterious aircraft dancing in the night skies—it was quite a story to be told. However, that is not the end of the story.

Some time later, Howard fell into a relationship with a young woman after he moved from the fish tanks. It did not work out. He made another couple of moves and another couple of relationships, which failed. Then I was informed Howard had killed himself. It made me so sad to realize that he indeed was this very lonely, troubled person that I was not able to help, and especially did not romantically love, and ultimately did not even want to know. I mysteriously fled from even a friendship, as something about him felt very wrong. He had been with a woman, living together, and without my knowing the fine-tuned information of the incident, he had bound her to a kitchen chair and murdered her amidst the swarming of a SWAT team outside, and then shot himself to death—who then shot him to death. I could say my radar, on my tuning device, did indeed work. I intuited that when all was well, his frequency vibrations were just fine; he was functional and actually pleasant. I was happy to know him, but when it went awry for him in the smallest turn, it was a different story. I’m so grateful I finally did tune in and was able to safely leave my vacation behind that summer. What if I had not listened? What if we had stayed? I don’t know.

It was many years before I knew about the conclusion of Howard’s life and his taking the life, so gruesomely, of his female partner. It was chilling to think we had been staying with him, once sleeping on the concrete floor and close to being held almost against our will. I never knew the story of his life, his family, his miseries. I hoped he would be at rest and at peace for a long time. I could not figure out how to feel about Howard after I heard about the murder, but I surely did not feel peaceful towards him in a sad journey at all. I hoped I would someday find a quiet place for him within myself, and with the passing of time, I think I have done that now. I thank my guardian, my angel, my God, for getting us out of there, for taking care of Emily, of us, for whatever that light was that followed us. Perhaps it was something helpful to us. I don’t know—a watcher, a gift, maybe just a star. Perhaps it was nothing at all; perhaps we have amazing imaginations. I don’t know; I’ll probably never know, but it gave me something to focus on besides the fear I felt just sitting in that truck, and still don’t know how to explain one of the oddest weeks of my life—the week that in just good faith I had hoped would be a fun and memorable vacation for my daughter and myself en route to see various family.

I can only say that even though we are always learning, getting to know people, getting to know ourselves, experiencing and navigating as students here in the classroom called life, I know we are always hoping for the best and hoping we are attracting all the good things to us, but sometimes the clue gets missed. Perhaps this is the soul’s learning curve in this realm. Life can be so uncertain in this world of communing with other souls, which means every other person we need to remember we touch shoulders with—others also here to learn their own lessons. Some souls may need us to help with their own uncertain learning curves; some souls springboard off us with their frailties as we may be more solid; some souls are like frightened or frantic moths being drawn to our uncommon light. It is good to remember to have one’s personal radar on, to tune in, and not to do it alone, but always ask for unfailing wisdom from God and our guides and our angels. Sometimes, when we are just learning how to tune our radio dial to just the right station, to the frequencies of love and joy, it is clear that we are just learning. It can take some practice to always hear the divine station I call the God station without any static or interference at all. Sometimes we just don’t know how yet; we just don’t know how. We find that for a moment we have certainly just been playing a very wrong station. Howard was, for certain, on the wrong station. My frequencies now are very distinct, exacting. I truly learned from this, and maybe this was why that experience happened. My radio stations play very clearly now. I’m also very grateful for this fine-tuning of my dial so I never have to ever have that kind of experience again. I deeply desired that I was of some quiet spiritual help to Howard in some way as he moved into position for the last segment of his life. I was unconditionally kind to him and never wished him ill. Even today, I wish him well on whatever he picked for his soul as he moved beyond here. I hope somehow he has been forgiven by families harmed by him through the murder and he will be released to us all. I say, journey with uncommon light, journey with divine awareness, and journey with unprecedented love. Journey joyfully and journey well. Manifest to you only that which is loving and holds also an uncommon light.