The Man Who Took on Charles Manson
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Brooks Poston followed Paul Crockett up the canyon wall, trying to keep his balance as loose stones shifted under his boots. Below them stretched Goler Wash, a narrow desert canyon carved into the western edge of the Panamint Mountains, one of the most remote and unforgiving landscapes in California.
Crockett, who was lean and weathered, moved across the rocks with the ease of someone who had spent years working the desert. Then he stopped and turned. “Where’s your attention?” he asked.
Poston hesitated.
Crockett pointed to the rocks beneath their feet. “If you’re walking on rocks,” he said, “your attention stays on the rocks.”
Crockett and Poston made for an unlikely pairing: a prospector in his mid-forties and a drifting 19-year-old musician. The two men had met only weeks earlier at Barker Ranch, a nearby remote desert outpost. Crockett had come to the desert that spring looking for gold. What he found instead was a young man whose mind had been slowly dismantled by a charismatic and dangerous ex-convict named Charles Manson.
“[Crockett] tried to straighten up my mind as to whether I was really dead or alive because I didn’t know,” Poston later said. “Charlie had told me that I was living in death and that I was supposed to give up my world so that I could have his.”
For Poston, a chance run-in with Crockett changed his life. The prospector offered the teenager a job hauling gold ore down from the mines in the Panamint Mountains after he’d left Los Angeles, where he’d been living with Manson and the Family, a group of runaways and drifters Manson had drawn into his orbit . The mining work was hard and deliberate.
“The whole thing was learning to keep your attention in present time,” Poston later said of his work with Crockett. The manual labor combined with Crockett’s unique background with spirituality wound up breaking the spell Manson had cast.
The story of Manson and his band of hippie followers has been told and retold for more than 50 years. But that familiar narrative, centered around the group’s two-day murder spree in August 1969 that left seven people dead, obscures one of the most revealing chapters of the Manson Family saga, before the murders, when the cult leader’s grip on his followers was fraying. What unfolded at a remote desert outpost in Death Valley was perhaps the only documented case of someone successfully counteracting Manson’s influence in real time: a quiet, middle-aged prospector who, through sheer presence and psychological insight, helped several followers break away before the world even knew Manson’s name. Crockett’s time studying some of the same fringe metaphysical ideas as the cult leader allowed him to break through with Manson’s followers. While Manson used the techniques to imprison minds, Crockett used similar tactics to set people free.
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Content retrieved from: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/paul-crockett-charles-manson-untold-story-1235587696/.
