“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At the end of the first day of the group’s most interesting visit. Richie and Yvette left to return to Connecticut. Jim and Debbie and Winter and Theresa left for the Holiday Inn in Elmira, New York, 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border. At the Inn in 1997 and 1999 Laurel and I had been guests at well-attended Seth conferences organized by Lynda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski. Our rich memories of those gatherings are nourished each time we drive past the Inn on our way to the hill house. We met our guests at the Inn the next morning, and the six of us drove in our three cars to a nearby country restaurant for breakfast. Then, with Laurel driving and our friends’ cars following, we traveled up a steep and winding hill just outside the city to not only a fine view but to Quarry Farm, an old-fashioned but large and elegant wooden homestead where Mark Twain had done some of his finest writing. No admittance, private property, a sign proclaimed, so we stood in the driveway just off the road to study the farm and its open and peaceful setting. Then back down into the city and to the campus of Elmira College. Jane had lectured to a class in creative writing at the college after the publication of Seth Speaks in 1972.There on the school’s green sward stood the small many-windowed gazebo that Mark Twain had worked in during his summers at the farm; it had been relocated to the college long ago. Not surprisingly it was locked, but still easy to inspect—and also to just accept as the people of Elmira and those in the college went about their daily activities. Mark Twain had been one of Jane’s favorite writers.

Next, at Jim’s request we visited the apartment house at 458 West Water Street that Jane and I had lived in when we moved to Elmira from Sayre in I960. We had stayed there until 1975, when we purchased the hill house at 1730 Pinnacle Road in West Elmira. Some years after we had moved out, the apartment house was painted a garish green, a color that was quite out of keeping with all of the other houses in the neighborhood. Now, the color is unevenly faded. The whole sprawling house looks shoddy, sagging almost, in need of general repair.

The last stop in our group’s little tour was to visit the hill house. 1730 Pinnacle Road sits on a corner lot up a modest hill on the western outskirts of Elmira. Jane and I fell for it the first time we saw it. It’s a one-story dark-green-painted dwelling with a big stone fireplace, and has a screened-in side porch and a one-car garage in back. The woods continuing on up the hill begin only 50 feet from the garage. The setting had—and has—privacy without being isolated from other homes not far away and it had plenty of room for our few possessions and work projects. That was a real treat to us.

We quickly made friends with the family across the road. Joseph and Margaret Bumbalo had three children, all living away from home. The youngest, John, who visited his parents occasionally, was attracted by the ideas in Jane’s work. (Now that was a coincidence!) He had, and still has, no doubt, a most powerful and moving baritone voice. He was also restless. When we met, John had little interest in an operatic career, as far as I recall, yet had taken professional singing lessons and given auditions. When he crossed the road to visit I would encourage him to sing a bit for us a cappella. The few brief times he did so I thrilled to the power and quality of his voice; I could feel it surging within me, as could Jane. John’s masculine power, while different from Jane’s Seth voice at its masculine strongest, represented the only time I’ve personally heard a voice that could match Seth’s voice at its best. Both voices could make my ears ring, conjuring up deep-seated wordless emotions that usually lay unsuspected within the psyche. Very revealing, Jane and John.

Another part of my routine at 1730, a somewhat selfish one I saw in retrospect, involved first walking and then running late at night. I’d always been active in sports, and later in dancing with Jane, but as her symptoms slowly deepened I became more and more reluctant to leave her alone except when I had full or part-time jobs. By the time we bought 1730 we could exist without my outside income for the most part as we concentrated on the Seth material. I had my chance, I told Jane: on other than session nights I was free to leave the house. I started out walking, but soon my nighttime excursions turned into running on those hilly streets in our neighborhood. Jane was reluctant to see me go out late at night, but I reassured her that she would be all right in the house and that I would be all right outside of it—and each one of us always was. My solitary treks became most enjoyable, no matter the time of year. I came to know intimately all of the dead-end streets opening off the main road, Coleman Avenue, like steps in a ladder that led up the hill to Pinnacle Road. I encountered wildlife on those streets. I told Jane that my record was six deer at one time. I stopped moving; they stopped; each side stared at the other in the porch light from a house across the street....

Then a strange little challenge began to develop. There were two cars lined up in the driveway. Without intending to, Laurel and Debbie became separated from the rest of us as they stood in back of the car nearest the road, while Winter, Jim, Theresa and I were clustered near the front of the other car as it was pointed toward the house. The four of us were so busy talking that we actually missed the little drama that followed: Laurel briefly mentioned it to me right after it took place—telling me that a very large bird, a hawk or an eagle, had flown from low over the house seemingly right toward her and Debbie before zooming back up to perch high in a tree in the backyard of the house across the road. Amid the other conversations going on I didn’t really appreciate what the two women had experienced until Laurel went into detail about it the next day. By then we were back in Sayre by ourselves as we sought to understand the meaning or message that was involved.

That night in Sayre, and the next day, Laurel mentioned her near encounter with the hawk or eagle several times before we finally got down to really discussing what had happened at 1730. I drew a crude map of the house and its grounds as seen from above. The front of the house, facing Pinnacle Road, cannot be seen from where all of us were standing in the driveway to the side and in back of it. On the map Laurel showed me how the bird had suddenly zoomed into view low over the house from Pinnacle Road, and then flown even lower toward the two women near the back of the second car in the driveway. Laurel exclaimed now about the bird’s enormous wingspan as it had seemed to fly right at her. It had made no sound except for the rush of air through its wings. Obviously my wife hadn’t been prepared for its seemingly friendly behavior.

On this October day last fall, as we stood in Jane and Rob’s driveway, (now my driveway also) at Pinnacle Road, Rob and most of the group started looking around the front of the house. I stood talking at the entrance of our driveway with a writer in the group.

As we stood talking another visitor dropped by also, rather literally, as a hawk or young golden eagle flew in! He or she appeared flying out of the Southwest, soaring down over the top of our house and flew right up to Deb and me to say hello! It was incredible to me as it took place, as I have never met a flying hawk or eagle face to face before. I have for many years had specific positive symbolic-seeming events with flying creatures and this seemed to be another one. Deb felt the same way. The hawk or eagle was completely in control in his or her flight, Deb and I were at no time in danger, but he or she flew in and actually looked at us almost face to face and then showed us a full in-flight wing span a meter wide (three feet or more) as he or she turned up the angle of flight and soared back up again, just over our heads. The creature flew across the road, soaring up into the branches of a tall tree, where it stopped and perched, and looked at us. Deb and I stood looking at the bird that sat with its profile to us—like a new friend who had flown in! We continued talking and were not looking at the bird when it flew away; we did not see where it disappeared to.

Perhaps he or she was a magical symbol of the powerful natural universe coming to visit, in the driveway of our Pinnacle Road house, along with individuals from the television industry, the power industry, the arts and financial worlds. At the same moment a large hawk or small eagle decides to drop by and say hello!