divining knife

My best friend Todd and I shared many (many) adventures during our high school and college years.
We spent a lot of time at his family's cabin.
We went camping and hiking a lot on the Olympic Peninsula, in the San Juan islands, and up and down the coasts of Washington and Oregon.
Once in a while we dropped LSD and made a day of it as we hiked and wandered around the Great Northwest.

We had a few inexplicable experiences and this is one of them.

We had dropped acid with our breakfast on the Washington coast in the Summer.
We packed our day packs, brought our staves (walking sticks), some food and water, and our knives.

Our knives.
We sort of had a thing about knives.  We each had a few, and were always on the lookout for interesting new ones.
This day Todd had his sweet knife from Sweden.  It had a blonde wooden burl handle sanded smooth and with a very thick tanged blade.  I think the design is a sort of the classic Swedish fisherman's knife, but short.  Maybe five and a half inches total length.

I had this big gnarly survival knife.  It wasn't the cheapest thing you could find, but it wasn't any top shelf blade either.  Hollow aluminum handle and a stainless steel blade that was serrated on the back.  It was about nine and half inches long and I loved that knife.

Now Todd is six foot two and I am five foot nine.  I mention these differences along with the knife specs because it factors into why this occurrence is remarkable to me.

We had been wandering down the beach.  Actually a bit back from the water among the big soft light brown dunes.  The wind was really blowing and it was a sort of blustery day.  We were wearing our gortex jackets and our packs and talking about all the many things that came to mind.  We were also playing a sort of game of throwing our staves and/or our knives way out in front of us, tracking its arc in the air, hoping that it would stick up when it landed, and walking to wherever it had landed.

The arcs in the air slowly grew as we ran a few paces and really long armed the throw.

We were headed back to the camp in a meandering sort of way and I didn't notice that the wind had picked up.
My heavy survival knife would sometimes (not very often) go completely below the surface of the sand upon landing on the sand.
I would have watched where it landed and find the disturbed sand and pick the knife out of the sand - didn't think much about it.

But the wind had picked up.
I executed my furthest throw yet with my knife.  It whistled and spun and gleamed in the weak hazy sun and landed some way down the beach.
I noted where it made contact with the dunes and we slowly walked in its direction.
An interesting discussion point came up and we stopped to debate it a bit and when we resumed walking I realized that I wasn't positive where the knife had landed.
I started scanning for disturbed sand.
There was none.
Wind is the great eraser on the chalkboard of the sand - and now the wind was really whipping.

The thought of losing my trusty knife that had been on so many trips with us was unthinkable - or at least very unsavory!
After digging in a few spots I decided to get methodical about it.

I paced off a twelve by twelve foot square that I thought pretty certainly must contain my knife.
I started at one end and started digging - kind of gingerly - about a foot down in a row left-to-right.
When I hit the right side of my square I graduated forward about a foot and dug out the next row.

This took some time.  The thing about the effects of LSD is that it can either have you super focused on one aspect of one thing for quite some time OR it can have you flitting from one subject to the next without really finishing any complete thought while you ramble from cold fusion to racoon hats to this little rock right here and then the movement of that grass in the wind over there - and those clouds!

While I got quite focused on finding my knife Todd sort of shuffled around in the dunes most immediate to my excavation.
I could hear him talking to himself now and then, singing a line or two of a song, then two rows of digging later he was sitting on the face of a dune trying to bury his legs.

I completed my search grid and I was empty handed.  I was bummed - like a dejected kind of bummed out.  I walked away from the dug up square and away from Todd for a bit to just feel my sadness at losing my awesome knife.
I notice that Todd is looking at me and I can tell he knows how bummed out I am.

He starts walking back to roughly the place where I had thrown my knife.
He takes his knife out and starts frowning and gauging the wind while he takes a couple of practice swings - obviously planning on throwing his knife.

The wind had changed, he was not standing in the same spot I had, we are very different heights, and the knives were completely different.

Now a thing or two about Todd.
Todd would sometimes relate very spiritual visions that he had during mushroom trips or while on LSD.
I couldn't quite relate.
I experienced quite profound things now and then - even life changing realizations - but I had never seen Native American ghosts in the mountain moonlight or had Satan stare at me through a rip in the night sky.  Todd did.

Todd was more interested in spirituality and philosophy than I was.  I had a passing interest in those things, but he knew more about Hinduism, Shamanism, and occult things.
There were times that it seemed that he was a bit smug about his spiritual leanings and seemed at times to think of other people around him as being a bit more mundane and plain than he was.

So against this backdrop I watch him ponder using his knife as a divining rod to find my knife.
Patently ridiculous.  If I couldn't find it after making a serious effort centered on where I had seen the knife land (more or less) then there was no way he was going to bump his knife into mine by throwing it 40 feet into the wind.
Most likely he was going to lose his knife too what with the wind sweeping the sand so constantly.

In my oversized grumpiness I think to myself, "Don't waste your time."

Todd hauls off and throws his knife a super long way.
It flits through the air and lands quite a bit away from the cordoned search site.
It lands straight up and down - blade sticking into the sand and all of the handle visible above the dune.

Todd then walks over and regards his knife.  He tilts his head back and forth looking at his knife.

Then he reaches down and levers his knife out of the sand sideways to his left.
He just levers it out of the sand.

My knife pops up out of the sand about three inches from where his knife stuck straight in.

I could explain it then and I can't explain it now.
My mind wants to assign meaning to it, but I resist the urge and will just say that I have no idea how he found my knife.

After Todd found my knife my mood lightened right up and we resumed our trip through the dunes tripping and talking and throwing our knives.