When I was around nine years old, after I got beat up and thrown into the transformer cage and had to be pulled out and pointed toward home so that I could find it while still in my stupor; all the Los Alamos kids were out at the Contaminated Canyon. It was always a no kid's land for us and we had all been thoroughly warned of it's dangers.

"If you ever fall into the canyon, we have to leave you there to die."

There was a water pipe, sewer pipe stretched across the canyon, hanging from a suspended cable.

"Gay", they yelled, "we dare you, we double dare you to cross the canyon."

It was like living inside "Lord of the Flies" literature in that atomic boom town, but I did not know that story yet.

I stood there, petrified. " If I do this thing, they will like me."

I looked at the canyon and could hear my father's warnings about chain link fences that had 10 foot tall lettering hanging on them that said,

"If you fall into one of these, we have to leave you there forever."

The kids nudged and dared me all the more. Daddy's voice became more and more dim. I put my school books down, and much to the surprise of all, I grabbed the first cable. The pipe was slippery. Wow, do I ever remember this story. My shoes were the leather ones of the 40's, probably Buster Brown Shoes. I began the foot over foot process. The cable ran down to the pipe before it picked up again and ran to the stretched suspension cable far overhead. So I had to straddle it and do the shinny bump and slide across the chasm while I looking down onto the tops of 150 foot old growth trees.

Half way across the wind up draft from the canyon floor was tremendous. The wind I can vividly remember. That cross current up draft will knock tractor trailers off of the highway and down prop job planes in a heart beat.

There I was; out over the canyon being one of the High Pipeline Wallendas. The rest of the kids were silent as their parents' warnings rang in their own heads. Not one of them followed me, as they had assured me they would do if I started the journey.

I remember now that it took forever to do this. At last I was on the other side and stood in the victor's stance. Then came to the realization that I had to go back across the same way I had gotten to the point where I was; on the wrong side of the canyon.

The kids across the canyon looked like ants to me: I called for them to follow me.

"Come on over. I dare you, come on over."

They just stood there on the other side.
The canyon was suddenly twice as deep.

I made it back the same way I came: shinny bump slide. By the time I got to the starting point all the kids were gone. There was no one to watch the Victor's Stance at the starting post. So I stood once more and looked down into the canyon. I remember thinking that it was deep and beautiful and that I would never tell my parents what I had done. I had the exhilaration of stark fear; accomplished victory; and no one to share it with: the three simultaneous feelings that make mountain top explorers and sailors and the rest of the crazies on the planet who have the 20% crazy factor:

"I'll do it anyway; I'll take the dare "genetic thread".

I had the deja vu experience of this while alone and suspended in a cable car over the trees on the way up to Whistler Ski Lodge north toward the glacier west of Vancouver. The wind was whipping my container around like a feather pillow on a clothes line in a tornado.

I was over the same kind of 200 foot tall trees suspended in the hanging basket. Alone up there with the wind, I could hear the tall trees turned into thousands of flutes as the up draft from the canyon floor played the song of the woods in their branches. Looking down, I remembered Los Alamos and hoped I would stay suspended there forever to hear this melody of mountains and canyons revisited in my mind.

In '97 I purchased a Lakota Flute in Taos and now I have that sound with me all the time. I am not good at it, by a long shot, but it sounds right to me and it doesn't take much to jog a memory.

The year prior to the flute purchase Mother un-cloaked my life. She told me all the things she knew about me that I just knew she couldn't know. She also told me things I never knew. At 76 she was cleaning her slate.

" Your father knew you walked the pipe across the canyon. The MPs in the guard tower called for him. He convinced them to let you finish, lest the commotion scare you and you would fall for certain. He watched you walk home from a distance. You scared him to death."

It would seem fitting to digress here and say that my dad was a daredevil water tower climber in his child hood days. So he understood the call of the 20% crazy factor.

Those kids all left me alone after that. They also didn't talk to me much either if I remember correctly. But I have always been a loner of sorts. More attributes of the 20% crazy factor thing I suppose.