The Night I Decided to Sell My Guns
As I, and the world, try to come to terms with the murder of a bunch of kindergarten students in the USA, I think back to the night that decided me on selling all of my own guns. I'd grown up with guns and I had a 12-gauge shotgun, a few deer rifles, a .22 pistol and semi automatic rifle, a lever action .22, and a Chinese SKS assault rifle I'd bought when I was in the US Marines. I had them all in storage on this particular night - a few days later I went and sold them all at a loss at a local gun shop. That was that.
I realized that it could have just as easily been my guns shooting at me and that if I would have had my guns with me, I would have shot back. Frankly, I like guns for shooting targets and bottles, maybe a deer - not for killing people.
At the industrial beach, my buddy gave me some LSD soaked sugar cubes. I figured it would be good to get away from everything for the weekend and asked my friend if he’d like to come along.
We loaded our gear into my bus and drove out to the boondocks. A small town called Acme, Washington. There was a free campground nearby with a nice little creek running through it. As we pulled in we noticed that there was a large number of what looked like permanent residents. Most of them giving us dirty looks as we drive up in a VW with a big peace sign on it.
We ignored them and set up our camp a good distance from anyone else. We were up on a hill, having a good view of the rest of the camp with a thick-forested hill behind us. We started a fire and consumed our sugar cubes as the sun disappeared. For about an hour or so, things went as they usually do with LSD. I had a conversation with a slug, my buddy was tripping on his parents, and the fire held our interest. The trip was pretty intense and so I brought out some white sage Lori had given me, to mellow things out. Many people believe white sage brings about a change and acts as a cleanser of negative energies.
The sage helped and as we both began to mellow out a gunshot rang out.
I looked at my friend and asked, “What was that?”
“An unnatural pause,” he replied.
Suddenly we heard a woman screaming and a baby crying. It sounded to me as if she were yelling at someone for shooting in the camp and waking her child. She was interrupted by seven or eight more gunshots. She and the child were completely silent. I looked to the right of our camp and saw a head in the bushes, watching us. I motioned to my friend who looked over and saw it to.
“What the hell? Who was that?” he asked. I didn’t know. The person disappeared.
A few moments later the guns began ringing out again. The sound was somehow different than before. I looked over the hill and saw four men, including the one who had been spying on us, firing their guns in our direction. My friend stood up and yelled at them.
“ Hey, we’re up here, there are people up here!” The firing increased in intensity.
“We got to get out of here man,” I said to him. We zigzagged our way through the thick brush. Not far into the hills we found a fallen log surrounded by thick ferns that we lay underneath. We covered ourselves with ferns and waited as gunfire continued and voices called out
“We’re gonna get you!” They yelled and bayed like hound dogs. The rednecks were searching through the woods for us. We had left camp suddenly and had no weapons of any sort. Just a nail he was using as a button to hold up his pants. We decided if one of them came upon us, I would take them down and he would stab the nail into their throat. We would then have a gun. This madness continued for about an hour and then we heard more trucks arrive, bottles begin to break, and drunken fights break out. Finally we heard the trucks all depart and we snuck down to our camp, five hours after leaving it. We quickly packed up and drove back to Bellingham.
I called the police to report the incident and they told me it was out of their jurisdiction referring me to the county sheriff, the county sheriff referred me to the State Parks Service, who in turn referred me to the Forest Service, who in turn told me they would look into it. The same night four campers were shot in a campground about 35 miles north in Canada.
Maybe some people would have decided that they needed to buy guns, but for me, this was a sign that I needed to sell mine.