Mapping Synchronicity

"...time is not absolute and independent but is dependent upon the motion of the observer."

~ J.W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time

I was reading an article about the two murderers who escaped from Danemora Prison in upstate New York, Richard Matt and David Sweat.  It caught my eye because they are the only two prisoners who have ever escaped from that prison since it was built in the 19th Century and because they were assisted in their escape by a seamstress who worked at the prison, Joyce Mitchell.

She apparently smuggled power tools in to them.  That made me think: how bewitched by someones personality can you be to do something like that? 

Anyway, I was reading about the prison.  It has a church.  Saint Dismas, the Good Thief (he was the thief who was crucified next to Jesus).  A master forger who was imprisoned there decorated the stained glass window.  It's a maximum security prison and has housed a ton of famous inmates.  I was reading who was imprisoned there.  The dude who was the pedophile in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans (Jesse Friedman).  TuPac did some time there.  And then I came across this one dude, Joel Rifkin, who was a serial killer who killed 17 prostitutes (and looks disturbingly like Alan Moore in some pictures...).   Rifkin was interested in horticulture and had befriended the then chief of the CIA's son who got him a job tending dwarf pines.  Weird.  Anyway.  Rifkin's birth parents were college students (his mom was 20 and his dad was 24) so they put him up for adoption and he was adopted by a Russian Jewish couple.  He was adopted on Valentines Day, 1959.  On a side note, I wonder if being abandoned by your birth parents to an orphanage played some part in him becoming a serial killer.  And if there's any truth to that, how much blame if any should his birth parents assume in giving him up for adoption?  Did their actions ripple out and play a part in the grisly deaths of 17 women?

Alan Moore (left), Joel Rifkin (right)

So, that's the first date.  Future serial killer adopted on Valentine's Day.  Weird, right?  That a guy who would grow up and kill prostitutes was adopted on the one day of the year which is all about 'love' and on the eve of the decade of 'free love'...

Anyway.  Turns out his last victim was Tiffany Bresciani, who was the girlfriend of the punk singer Dave Insurgent (born Dave Rubenstein) from the band Reagan Youth (I never heard of them).  So, I start reading about the punk band Reagan Youth and Dave Insurgent.  The band's name was a take on 'Hitler Youth' and meant to satirize the young republican movement.  Dave's parents were actual holocaust survivors, so it gave the whole thing a bit of extra energy. 

The day Reagan ended his presidency the band broke up.  Dave tried a few other bands (House of God) but never was as successful.  He went downhill and got involved in heroin.  On one occasion he got into an argument with a drug dealer who hit him on the head with a baseball bat and caused so much trauma that Dave had to have a lobectomy and his eyelid apparently drooped all the way down to his upper lip...  The lobectomy left him with permanent scars over his forehead from ear to ear.  It must have given him a kind of Shane McGowan or Boris Karloff kind of messed up charisma though.  Why?  Read on.

It was at this time that he met Tiffany Bresciani.  She supported his heroin addiction (she was an addict too) and he would wait for her while she worked tricks to get money for drugs.  Sounds like they had a kind of Sid and Nancy type of relationship.  I dunno.  Anyway, one day she gets picked up by Joel Rifkin.  And he kills her.  And then days later Rifkin is caught speeding by a traffic cop and he tries to escape.  When they finally catch him they find Tiffany's dismembered body in the trunk.

Meanwhile, Dave is waiting for Tiffany to turn back up from her trick with Rifkin.  When she doesn't show up, after an hour or whatever he goes to "all the local Emergency Rooms" and the police stations and basically scours the area looking for her (obviously totally in love with her, right?  To show that much concern.  Which is at odds with letting her trick herself out for drugs, but then, life is complicated I guess).  So, when he finds out she has been killed by this serial killer he sinks into depression and a few days later he commits suicide (by overdosing on anti-depressants), aged 29.

He commits suicide on July 3rd, 1993.  A week after Rifkin is caught with Tiffany's body in his trunk.  And more notably, to me at least, on the eve of the 4th of July.  It's ironic to me, because he spent his life as a punk, singing about his hatred for conservatives, and you can kind of misconstrue the patriotism of the 4th of July with conservative fervor, ya know -  'American Idiot' kind of Green Day thing, right?

Kind of weird as a date to kill yourself, as a punk rocker, the eve of the 4th of July. 

So there you have this circle of tragedy, from Valentines Day, when Rifkin was adopted to the eve of the 4th of July when Dave Rubenstein commits suicide. 

I dunno.  To me, it's kind of fucked up.  But have a look at the one and only photo of Tiffany Bresciani that I could track down.  She's got very haunting eyes.  Like she's mocking life.  It's weird.  In a cool way. 



Sometimes I feel as if tragedy has a way of seeking out other tragedies.  Like a piece of music creates a certain mood if you're within earshot, sometimes almost subconsciously.  Hidden lives leave a vapor trail that, if you cross you get sucked into without really realizing or understanding.  Nothing truly happens in isolation.

Healthy Hippies & Wagner's Butte

'Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it' ~ Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

I’ve set myself the task of scaling every peak, sniffing out every oddity and over-night’ing in as many haunted hovels in the region I have come half-reluctantly to call home. 

To begin, I set out to scale Wagner Butte.  A big hill near Talent where you can see for miles across the Rogue Valley (if it’s a clear day).  A butte is a curious term.  Is it a hill or a mountain?  Could it be a peak?  It’s got elements of a bluff, but it’s too narrow to be a mesa.  If in doubt, call it a butte.  Apparently there was a lot of doubt back in the day because there’s a shit ton of butte’s in Oregon.  Black Butte, Glass Butte, there’s even a (you guessed it) Big Butte, right here in my own home county of Jackson, Oregon.  But I digress…

Wagner Butte’s allure is that it’s accessible (an hour’s drive from Medford, 30-minutes paved road, 30-minutes fairly navigable gravel road) and from the peak you can see for miles in every direction.  I like a challenge and a 5-mile ascent of 2,000 feet qualifies as such for my old bones.  I’m calling it 5-miles, even though other reviews call it 5.2 miles.  My expensive GPS watch claims it was 5.2 miles out and 4.9 miles back.  I’ve mused over the discrepancies my expensive Suunto Amibt GPS watch throws out.  Could it be that switchbacks confuse it?  I don’t know, so I round up the decimals and call it good. 

5-miles is 5-miles.  Flat.  But 5-miles up is a bit of a cunt, made only barely acceptable by the vague promise of a return 5-miles in a generally downward direction.  I started out, a mile and a bit in and I overtook some old quasi hippy (probably from Ashland), made identifiable as a hippy by the head scarf, walking at a slow and deliberate pace up a steep-ish gradient.  I huffed past him and grunted out a ‘how are you doing?’.  Like all strangers, he avoided my eyes and smiled politely as if a retarded child had just said something awkward in an elevator.

After another half mile I came across a mother and daughter coming in the opposite direction with a child I would judge to be around 10-years-old.  Hmm, I thought.  They don’t look tired.  It’s an alleged 10-mile round trip with a 2,000 feet elevation gain and that kid didn’t even look like he’d broken a sweat.  Perhaps this won’t be too hard after all.

Lies…  I don’t know whether they just went a short ways up the trail and turned around or the child was drinking some mutant strength formula, but meeting them just gave me false hope which in turn further fueled my general vitriolic temper.  Thus far, I’d had two encounters on the trail.  A trail I had taken in no small part to escape humanity, or at least take a brief sojourn.  Instead I met a hippy and an inhumanly fit child.  I was feeling the old pain in my hip.  The burning in my lungs.  The ringing in my ears.  2-miles in, I remembered what I always forget: nature gets old very quickly.  Trees are trees.  It’s pretty for 5-seconds.  After that, it’s just trees.  Then you notice the cracks and imperfections.  The red fire ants scurrying tirelessly across the trail.  The little gnats that fly under your sunglasses and seek out the moisture of your eyeballs.  And the other cracks you don’t notice till it’s too late.  The creosote dripping off the bark on the tree you lent your hand on for a moment to catch your breath. 

It’s okay, don’t fight it.  Nature sucks.  Just like the city below.  There’s no escape.  And you’ve got 3-miles to go before you even reach the turn-around.  These are the thoughts my monkey brain regurgitates with no distractions to keep it from facing itself.  Eventually, I let them drift past.

About 3-miles in, you get to a fork in the path with two withered old signs, Wagner Butte 2-miles that way, or Wagner Gap an indeterminable digit in the other direction.  These faded signs and barely noticeable forks are what makes hiking fun.  More than once I’ve taken a wrong turn and nearly died, cold and alone on a desolate Butte.

I got to the summit after about two-hours of crushing my hip flexors and passing a troupe (I shall call them that collectively) of senior hikers with hiking poles, who commented on my lack of company  (“on a solo voyage?”).  Yes.  Yes, I am. 

The summit was a pile of boulders about the size of a large house that you could somewhat precariously scramble up.  At this point, despite the fact that I once jumped out of planes with a machine gun strapped to my side, I am not ashamed to admit that I am a little afraid of heights.  Standing on top of a pile of boulders 7,000 feet up in the air is kind of intimidating.  I don’t quite understand how everyone else who got to the top and took a selfie looks so chillax’ed. I got there.  Glanced over the top through a swirl of cloud.  Nodded that, yes, indeed that was the summit, and then hunkered down into a hollow made by an overhanging boulder to gather my thoughts.

I was grateful no one else was there.  It doesn’t matter where you live, you’re still in your head.  And that was the sum of my deep, Butte-top reflection.  I set off back down the trail.  I passed the old hippy, he looked tired and much more friendly this time.  I felt bad for stereotyping him.  Then I passed a couple of runners in skin tight latex, whose immaculate tans and chipper demeanors made me wary.  I didn’t pass anyone else.  It took me half the time to get down as it did to get up.  I wonder if that’s a fair analogy for life.  We scramble up to get some place we thought we needed to be and then effortlessly descend back to ground, wondering what we learned (or didn’t’).

I learned that we are doomed never to learn from the mistakes of our past.  Next on my list, Stein Butte (I'm doing all the butte's).