“Alone in the Wilderness”…Why Not, Charlie???

I, like several other Manson researchers I know, follow the posts on the Official ATWA site – the blog-spot for the Order of ATWA – Air, Trees, Water & Animals, their founder, Charles Manson, of course!

I have attempted to ask the webmaster of the ATWA site, this burning question of mine, but my efforts are to no avail…

“Why, if the Air, Trees, Water & Animals were so gosh darned important to Manson, did he not a) gravitate to the back-country instead of the Haight? and b) form this association BEFORE the Hinman/Tate-LaBianca murders and not after them?”

I, of course, continue to have my questions ignored and deleted from their site, heck, they won’t even give me a private answer, despite my leaving my TLB2 website where they could easily reply to me.

Nope, all I get is silence.

But I don’t give up easy. I continue to watch, listen and hopefully learn on my own why ATWA exists, has a following and admirers of Charles Manson and his beliefs, even if those beliefs seem to be counter-intuitive to murder itself.

Of course, Charliemites will tell you that Charles was NOT behind the murders, that it was those crazy kids he lived with out at Spahn’s Ranch. And while he was “boffing” yet another too-young chick out there, on each night of the murders, the thought of mind control, murder and mayhem never entered his mind.

You know, on some really perverse level, I actually want to believe that old Charlie was as snow-white as he claims to be, but then, I’m still waiting for any document, any testimony, any anything to back up that desire. But damn, if I’m not getting old here waiting…

Often, in my Manson Family quest to seek the truth, I can feel very much alone, alone in the wilderness you might say…

And oddly enough, that is the title of ATWA’s latest post,

“Alone in the Wilderness” , a documentary of Dick Proennecke (1916-2003) who attempts to give up the trappings of society for a year in the great outdoors, a journey that would see this courageous man live in the Alaskan wilderness for the rest of his days.

When did Dick attempt this quest, you ask?

The Spring of 1968.

Sharon Tate was already pregnant by then.

Well, when I clicked on to ATWA’s site and watched the video, I found a birdie deep inside my gut screaming, “Charlie, for God’s sake, why couldn’t you have done this instead of swallowing LSD like it was cotton candy, getting an ego the size of Texas and exercising your demons out on the training of killer automatons?!!!”

And, of course, since I’m usually up late at night, alone in my own wilderness, Charlie (and no one at ATWA) seemed to yell back, “Heck MsBurb, I was headin’ to the wilderness when a funny thing happened to me on the way to Death Row!” or some non-sequitur of the sort.

Within seconds of watching this film, I could so easily put Charlie in the frames. Instead of this gentle man, Dick, who sought solitude among nature, a life-affirming and not life-destroying act, discovering if he truly could enjoy his own company, as he said, I see myself pasting Charlie’s head and body in the film, pack-sack on his back, munching on smoked salmon, cutting, aging and honing the logs he would need to build his own back-country utopian world, far away from the stresses of the civilized one.

Sure, the tools and the canoe Dick brought with him were air-lifted in by pontoon plane - the tools, the canoe and the plane all manufactured not in the back-country world but in the civilized one. But who’s keeping score, right? Not MsBurb, nope, not me!

If this documentary had been about Charlie instead of Dick, Charlie could have lived that life of solitude, being Charlie to the nth degree “out there”, alone and harmless with his crazy thoughts. Of course, wild animals make lousy cult followers so I imagine his fireside sermons would have been far less animated. Heck, even if he had had a “psychotic moment” (as he would excuse his actions on the eve of the L.A. killings) “out there”, who would care? If you gave Charlie a Buck knife during this “moment”, what could he do with it, “Sharon Tate” a grizzly bear to death? Hardly.

Nope, alone in the wilderness would have been the saving grace for Charlie, for ATWA’s future reputation, for everyone involved. Heck, even the victims would nod their heads in approval, I’m sure.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, Dick finished that log cabin of his on the shores of Twin Lakes and spent the next thirty years living in it, the question of whether or not he could enjoy his own company long since answered. An no, Dick never murdered anyone, at least not human anyway.

While I wait, alone in my own Manson Family researching wilderness, hoping for that document or that testimony to magically appear, you know the one, the one that would completely exonerate Manson from Hinman/TLB, I think I’ll go build myself a log cabin in the wilderness too, just like old Dick did.

It may take me a lifetime to build but I don’t expect a response from ATWA on my comments nor proof of Charlie’s innocence any time soon either…I’ve got loads of time.