I grew up just north of St. Louis, where the muddy banks of the Missouri River were only a half mile or so away. They started suddenly in someone’s back yard, spacious woods rolling themselves out downhill gradually before suddenly plunging into a sheer drop of mud and rock. The trees behind you were always leafless and seemed cleanly cut against the sky. The river smelled like the Cosmic Egg.
I knew the river came here from somewhere north, but was unsure of its true origin. I just imagined a series of thin tributaries feeding into it; a veiny network stretching from northern Canada, perhaps somewhere near the Arctic Circle, running on down the center of the continent like stretch mark until, swollen and brown it fed into an even bigger monster, the Mississippi.
In my mind the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were connected enough to be the same: The River. It was scary and sad and exciting all at once. It both pleased and terrified adults; realizing this as a child was my first sensation of something that I can only call nihilistic grandeur. It moved and smelled like an animal.
You could spend your entire life with the river as your livelihood, eating its fish or using it to turn a profit somehow, and one day it would kill you. It was ancient and fickle. It would change course and take your house. It would drown the farmland that only years earlier it had made so loamy and fecund. The river was the first great and powerful mystery in my life, as well as a symbol of all the other wanderings of my imagination. In St. Louis, where I grew up, those wanderings were the sole source of adventure. They began with the river and ended in books.
Magazines, also. One of my favorite things to read was my dad’s collection of Omni magazines. Omni was a science fiction/fact magazine that ran from the late-70s until the mid-90s, a long ago age when periodicals were still thick and prestigious and printed with ink onto dead plants. There were pieces about magnetic levitation and the Soviet ESP program right next to original fiction by William Burroughs and T.C. Boyle. There was even a story called “Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin. Long before he was famous, I read his writing sitting cross-legged on my cold concrete basement floor, surrounded by the drying exoskeletons of dead bugs. That was really the only way to read Omni.
But the strange doesn’t have to be dark. I also read Shakti Gawain, a New Age self-help guru who has probably sold more books than your five favorite contemporary poets combined. Her whole thing was “creative visualization,” which is a nice way of saying “wishing makes things true.” There were probably other New Age self-help writers that I read, but none stand out like Shakti, if only because she made the esoteric seem so accessible. Of course, a kid who feels powerless is going to like being told that he carries the secrets of the universe within him. It wasn’t really all that different from stories meant for children, which say the same thing anyway.
If Omni was dorky and Shakti was quirky, then the ancient alien-civilization books were just embarrassing. Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Daniken. The name of the book and author alone should be enough to give you a sense of the quality. If that’s too little to convince you, here are a few things the book mentions: spaceports discovered in the Andes; early contact between humans and aliens (possible cosmic human origins?); ancient astrological navigation maps; and the Nazi origins of the American space program.
I didn’t accept any of these assertions as fact, but when I read the book alone in my tent on a rainy camping trip, the stories had an effect. Von Daniken would later go on to become the voice of Bob on the cartoon Bob The Builder. I would later go on to write about reading esoteric texts during my formative years.
I’d read all these stories and I’d go back to the river. There were rumors of Satanic cults worshiping there at night. Someone claimed to have found a dog cut up into pieces and stuffed in a gym bag. The stories I read only made my terrible visions stronger. But they also gave me an odd confidence, knowing being half the battle, as they say. It would take me years to shake off the strange miasma I led my juvenile mind through. Maybe I haven’t shaken it completely.
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