Outcast Earth: Into the Wilderness

Following the physically and emotionally difficult expedition in the Mojave Desert, the Outcast Earth team retreated to the cool, green thicket of the redwood forest in northern California. They created a base-camp in the center of the Big Basin Redwood State Park, located to the north of Santa Cruz, California. There, they intended to recuperate from the Mojave Desert ordeal (including the tragic death of Rune’s friend, Tate) but also debate whether or not the team was operating under a curse. Cipher has turned out to be the leading proponent of the curse theory, perhaps because he was one of the first “victims” of it during the explosion of old ordnance in the Saipanese cave that landed him in the hospital for two weeks. Cipher expressed his belief in the curse theory in his October 7, 2007, journal entry:

As we put this tragic chapter of our expedition behind us, I can't help but to look back on the last year and see some connections that for me are glaring. How many "why's" have we asked during that time? Why did we receive those eerie fortunes at the Hachiman Jinja shrine in Saipan and what did they mean? What was the meaning behind Ash's strange encounter with Tahiki on the beach of Iwo Jima? Why were Trespass and I almost vaporized in a cave on Saipan? What happened to Anvil? And lastly, why did this last accident happen that almost killed Rune and landed Ash in the hospital? We are either the unluckiest people on earth or there's something else going on here.

As the team began to look back on these unfortunate series of events, more and more of them were beginning to entertain the possibility that there might be more at work than originally met the eye. The curse theory, however, was not the only demon that needed to be exercised.

Rune’s intimate relationship with Tate had also created problems between her and Trespass. The latter had long harbored a deep affection for Rune, feelings that had first begun to manifest themselves when the duo had undertaken the quest to find Trespass’s missing mother in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. The revelation that Rune did not share Trespass’s feelings created both resentment and jealousy for Trespass, and those ugly emotions came erupting to the surface on October 26, 2007, when he stormed out of the camp and disappeared for twenty-four hours into the forest.

Trespass’s disappearance was more than worrisome, however, it also appeared to have some paranormal aspects to it. Polaris wrote the following on November 1, 2007:

Ash just shared a really curious story with me so I'm emailing this off before I forget. Although we shared with the other members some details of Trespass’s ordeal in the woods last night, neither Cipher or I offered a lot of detail. This morning, however, Ash told me that he had dreamt of Trepass “lying in a hole inside a tree.” He said that Trespass was cold and shivering and his sleep was being constantly disturbed by sounds he kept hearing in the woods. When I asked Ash what kind of sounds his was talking about, he said the sounds were footsteps and whispers. He stated that in his dream there was three ghosts – two men and one woman – who were walking around in the forest. He said they were watching Trespass. I’m sure this has no relationship to Halloween. Right? No relationship at all? Hey, why do I have goosebumps?

Amazingly, Trespass later confirmed the validity of Ash’s dream and further stated that he saw “two men, one very tall and one very short” stalking him through the woods. Trespass climbed inside a hollow tree after sundown to hide from them and wait out the night. In the blackness, however, he said he could see hear them walking around in the forest:

...you could see them from a distance, even be looking right at them, and when the light in the forest shifted they would just disappear. It was kind of like a rainbow. The [sunlight] reflects off of water vapor in the air and you see the rainbow. The sunlight shifts even slightly and the rainbow [is] gone. Once the sun went down I couldn’t see them anymore because the only light source I had on me was my [cigarette] lighter. One was very tall and the other was short. They never got too close. They were always about a fifty yards away or so. After it got dark and I crawled inside the tree to sleep, I could still hear the two men walking around in the forest. I heard them all night long but when morning came they were gone...

Both intrigued and concerned by the incident, Polaris suggested that the team retrace Trespass’s steps and find the “hollowed out tree.” They were able to do so after about a four hour hike through the forest and decided to camp in the area to see if they could tell who the two shadowy men were. Ash offered additional psychic impressions, however, and claimed that there was also a woman with the two men – a claim that Trespass initially denied. That night, Cipher, Rune and Meridian decided to sleep inside the hollow tree in the hope of recreating Trespass’s experience. The results were startling, as Rune recorded in her journal of November 8, 2007:

I will admit, I crawled inside the hollowed-out tree last night and expected to wake up this morning covered with mud, centipedes and rotting bark. But that was not my experience at all. The hollow is extremely comfortable and it was the best sleep I have experienced since Tate was killed. I slept a total of ten hours and had the most amazing dreams, most of which I could remember vividly after waking up. That was unusual for me. Most of the time my dreams vanish with the daylight, but it was almost like my dream state was amplified while inside the tree. I relived huge parts of my childhood, saw friends and family who passed out of my life [decades] ago, drifted over places on earth I’ve never been to. I have a very clear recollection of hovering in space over a large stone temple overgrown by jungle vegetation. Below, I could see several people climbing the stones to reach the pinnacle of the temple, but I could not tell who they were. Then I felt myself floating through the redwoods on this meandering path. The forest was filled with people and animals, or the spirits of people and animals. They weren’t people I knew personally, but rather the sum total of different eras, lives and cultures that seemed to be funneled through the trees and into my brain. I could feel all of their emotions, but it wasn’t scary. It was liberating. I don’t know... did I have a vision quest here?

There’s also something kind of amazing about crawling inside this living thing which has been standing here for as long as a millennia, Polaris added in his own journal. According to our obliging webmasters, it is estimated that the lifespan of a redwood (sequoia tree) can be as long as 2,500 years. That means this tree, whose size and age I cannot possibly document for you, may have started out as a sapling at about the same time as Classical Greek culture was on the rise; the Roman Republic was forming; and the Persian Empire was out to conquer the world. It’s a very humbling thought. All night long, lying among these trees in a forest that is primeval in every sense of the word, I felt as though I was surrounded by beings much older, wiser and [more] intelligent than I could ever hope to be.

VISION QUESTS: A traditional rite of passage among the Inuit people and other Native American tribes. The vision quest is usually undertaken at the end of puberty and involves a young man or woman retreating to the wilderness for an extended period of time in the hopes that their spiritual destiny will be revealed through visions or other metaphysical experiences. This process often involves the appearance of a spirit guide who frequently appears in animal form. The spirit guide will reveal previously hidden information to the individual which will profoundly effect their lives. The vision quest is freqently used among cultures that practice shamanism, which is a series of traditional beliefs and practices performed in cultures throughout the world that are designed to bridge the human world with the spirit world. There are allegedly a variety of benefits to the vision quest, including the ability to cure illness; letting go of past traumas and pain; creating a stronger connection to the Divine through personal experiences; and enhancing oneís connection to other people, nature and the physical world. Many people who have undertaken a vision quest report that they were profoundly changed by the experience and that their life took on new, more important meaning.

It turned out that nearly every member of the team has some form of vidid dream experience while sleeping inside the tree.

Ash dreamed that a man entered the tree, sat down beside him and had a long conversation with him. Ash could not remember from the experience who this person was, only than he was male and a friend. Ash described this person’s body “was like dust,” or that you could see it floating as flecks in the air but there was nothing solid about it. It was Cipher who pointed out that that description was very similar to Trespass’s description of the mysterious men he encountered in this forest days before. How much of this was Ash being influenced by Trespass is debatable, of course.

Coyote who had rejoined the team temporarily before returning to Kaua’i in late December, had a dream experience that was much more alarming. In his dream, he said he was walking down an old dirt road in the middle of a forest similar to the redwood forest that surrounded them. He described the area as being thick with pine trees, cold and rainy. He came upon an old dilapidated house sitting back in the thicket with a barb-wire fence at the edge of the road and a large tree stump. Sitting on the tree stump was Anvil. He was dressed in a large black trash bag that he was using as a rain poncho. He looked up at Coyote and smiled. Coyote asked him, “Where have you been?” Anvil answered with, “He got me.” Coyote immediately became alarmed and began to run down the road, away from Anvil and the old house. He said he felt like he was being chased but when he looked back over his shoulder, there was clearly no one chasing him. As he ran in a panic, his body suddenly broke into a hundred pieces like a glass vessel shattering. The hundred pieces formed into a hundred miniature replicas of Coyote and fled in all directions. He said that this is how he escaped this unseen danger.

Trespass’s dream was cryptic and seemingly mundane. In it, he was visiting the state of Florida, a place he’s never been. Trespass said he knew it was Florida because he saw images of oranges and Epcot Center at Disneyworld. There did not appear to be any meaning or “plot” to his dream. As he described it, “the dream was just a bunch of disconnected images... it was like a poor video from Florida tourist bureau.”
Polaris described his dream as “a snippet out of a Terry Gilliam movie. By that, I mean that the dream had a real Baron Munchausen / The Brothers Grimm / Time Bandits / Brazil sort of quality to it. The weird melding of history, science, fantasy, architecture, myth and whimsy...” In it, Polaris was standing on the deck of an immense sailing ship. The wooden vessel was shaped kind of like a squash with sails that must have been as tall as skyscrapers. The ship was sailing not on the high seas, but through the cosmos with galaxies leisurely passing by on all sides. The entire team was there - Rune, Meridian, Trespass, Cipher, Ash and Coyote. Everyone was busily working at different tasks. To his delight, Polaris discovered that he could change the ship’s direction with a simple wave of his hand. “I could use my fingertip and draw designs and the space around us would conform,” he remembered. “For example, I could draw a beach with palm trees on it and suddenly we were sailing pass just such a beach...”

Finally, whatever Cipher experienced in the tree he decided not to share with the rest of the team.

Almost immediately following this unusual rash of dream experiences, the team began to notice strange images showing up on the photos they were taking in the area. The first was of a crouching figure in a sun-drenched glade whom the team initially referred to as the “frog man” due to what appeared to be two large black eyes and a green face. After several days of photo analysis, however, the team came to believe that the image was actually that of their missing teammate, Anvil. [Click here to see an animated analysis of the "frog man" photo and its comparison to photos of former OCE member Anvil.]

But the photo of Anvil was not the only strange phenomenon caught digitally. Days later, Meridian and Cipher offered two more strange photos. In the first, the ghostly figure of a woman appears over Trespass’s right shoulder and appears to be watching him. The team was quick to remember Ash’s psychic impression that a woman was also “lurking in the forest.” The second showed what appeared to be a “double-exposure” of Coyote, with two nearly identical Coyote figures standing together. Excitement flooded through the camp and the OCE members eagerly debated the meaning of their dreams, the spectral forms seen lurking in the woods and the newly taken “ghost photos.” Only Cipher remained quiet, until December 2, 2007, when he dropped a bombshell with this journal entry:

Everyone’s been bugging me to write about my thoughts and impressions now that the redwood forest odyssey is over. I know I’ve been a little reluctant to give my complete analysis of this, and that’s because I wasn’t really sure what I was thinking and feeling. It’s like my head and my heart have been pulled in so many different [directions] and I just needed some time to process it all. I think we’ll all be spending the next weeks and months trying to figure out all the strange shit that happened in that forest. We’re all still debating over how many entities there were in and around that tree, although the general consensus appears to be three... with one being Anvil. What about the other two? Here are my thoughts on that...

I think the “short man” presence we all felt was Anvil. Whether this means he’s dead or imperiled somehow, who knows??? I think we can honestly say that it means we won’t be seeing him again, at least not physically.

I think the “tall man” presence was Tahiki . Although we didn’t get a photo of the tall man, several of us saw him lurking through the trees with our own eyes. When I saw him, he was too far away for me to see any details, but based on the photos of Tahiki and your descriptions of him, the height and body shape would seem to match. The guy I saw in the woods was at least six-foot-five and I know Tahiki was extremely tall too. The other reason I think this was Tahiki is that he [has] already appeared to us in apparitional form at least once. [See the Black Sands of Iwo Jima for more information.] Clearly he has some deep connection to this group.

Finally there’s the woman entity. This was the most puzzling one for me, because for the longest time I simply couldn’t figure out who this woman could possibly be. Then looking back through your notes and journals, it became so obvious. The woman entity is Trespass’s step-sister, Meryl. The one photo we have of her is of her standing behind Trespass and watching him. At first I thought this was coincidence, but now I think it was significant.

If the redwood forest, and particularly the hollowed out tree, had some kind of amplifying effect on paranormal phenomenon, then maybe what we were experiencing was significant on almost every level. Rune described herself as feeling profoundly different, rejuvenated, after leaving the forest. I agree. Everything’s different now.

NEXT EXPEDITION: Spirits of Silicon Valley