In the afternoons, following a day grappling with my high school insecurities, I’d stroll down the street from school to visit my friend Bill Halas at his home. Sometimes I’d bike over there in the evenings. Bill’s mother accepted me as an addition to a household that once included a husband and five older siblings. She and Bill, the latecomer, were both avid cooks and gardeners and active readers, sharing sophisticated tastes in music and art. Bill’s father passed away when he was very young, and when I met him his older siblings had long departed the household. Having an extraordinarily precocious and active mind his life had taken a rather solitary trajectory, his mother being the most reliable companion and sometimes his intellectual adversary. My own teenaged life was made unusual by the experience of being recruited for a special government program that took poor kids with high IQ’s out of their normal milieu and sent them to spend the summer living on college campuses. Our friendship flourished. Together we navigated the complexities of a rapidly changing world in the late 60’s, our bond growing from a shared sense of alienation and a drive for mutual discovery.

We met amidst a shifting cultural landscape with war, race riots, and assassinations unfolding in real time on our television screens. Popular culture was shifting radically from the segregated milieu of radio and the movies. Grasping for alternatives, we immersed ourselves in diverse music genres, from jazz to classical to experimental, and engaged in earnest discussions on philosophy and politics. We wandered the city smoking cigarettes rolled with pipe tobacco. We agreed and disagreed on everything. Sometimes we took his mother’s little Honda on road trips across the northern Ohio countryside, making up poetry inspired by highway signs (‘Pass With Care’).

I was the idealist and Bill was the purist, who took everything down to its roots. When I first met him he was experimenting with hydroponics. When he became interested in weaving he built his own loom and wove his own cloth and made his own hats. When he took up photography he began by studying its history, then building his own pinhole camera. Finally, he took up his brother’s old Nikon and developed the photos in his dad’s basement darkroom. My own nature was less grounded, tending toward the pursuit of imaginative utopian speculation and obscure strains of idealistic thinking. I felt compelled to understand the whole of everything, and very path I took led me down side roads, making it difficult to pursue a single course or become a model student.

Bill’s political awareness was way ahead of my own. He travelled to Chicago with his brother in 1968 to demonstrate at the Democratic convention and brought back photos and first hand accounts from the fringes of the police riot that we’d all watched on television. Later in our high school career we conspired with like minded friends to create an alternative journal that we mimeographed at the local anti-war office. We passed out leaflets and marched in circles chanting slogans in downtown Cleveland and attended meetings of a small radical organization led by a retired teacher and veteran of the Lincoln Brigade who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

888

Our friendship endured beyond high school as we pursued separate paths in college, delving into alternative communities and exploring the back-to-the-land movement. Bill’s quest for self-sufficiency and my search for spiritual revelation led us on distinct journeys. During those years in the early seventies everything everywhere was in flux and was being questioned, and for both of us the quest took us out of the proscribed path of college and career.

After we’d both left school we got together for a road trip east, tracking down old classmates and exploring alternative possibilities. We proceeded to Boston, where we met a friend of Bill on a sidewalk near Harvard Square. A large expansive figure closely resembling the British actor Peter Ustinov (with a beard), he sold carnations on the street, playing a concertina and disarming prospective customers with a performance that came right out of magical fairytales. We spent that evening at his lodgings in the attic of an unheated and condemned three story house in Roxbury. The next morning we crawled out of our sleeping bags to get breakfast at a nearby cafe. Our appetite for squalor satiated, we made our way out of the city and headed back to the Midwest.

Eventually, after making a long pilgrimage to the West I moved to Denver. Occasionally, while visiting my family back east I’d get together with Bill and he’d demonstrate for me whatever new endeavor had absorbed his interest. Over time these became increasingly esoteric even for my taste, involving dowsing and ley lines evidence for antedeluvian alien carvings left behind in rocks and boulders. He poured over old maps illustrating the mysterious energetic pathways determining the placing of streets and structures in small towns all over Ohio.

Our contacts dwindled over the years, and the last I heard from Bill was through letters filled with further interpretations of ancient artifacts and faces found in the rocks. I’d heard he was in contact with the Edgar Cayce people in Virginia and intended to build his own private settlement on a plot of land that his brother owned in Vermont. After at a year of hearing nothing I found out from his mother that he’d fallen out of communication with everyone. In a last message to his older brother, Bill had mentioned spotting a brown bear on the plot of land. After months of trying to track down his whereabouts the family concluded that he’d disappeared without a trace. For the sake of closure they accepted that he’d probably been eaten by the bear.

I don’t know what really happened to Bill Halas. All I’m sure of is that

All I know is that we shared a moment in time, embarking on uncompromising journeys, determined to face the mysteries of the world, whether in the rocks, the forest, or the primal currents beneath.”