When I pulled up in the stakebed, John William came out to see who it was, barefoot and with his beard looking denser than it had in March, and stood by the cordwood defensively until he realized it was me. “Countryman,” he said. “You’re here.”
“What’s this about?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve gone trailer-trash.”
“No, I haven’t.”
He was leaning in the passenger-side window now, taking in the cab with its floor-mounted stick shift, the chain-saw files in the ashtray, and the hole where my radio used to be before Keith borrowed it. “Alexander Pope,” he said accusingly.
We went in and, sitting by his woodstove on aluminum lawn chairs, ate bread and peanut butter. John William kept the lights off and the stove door open, so that we could see what we were doing but also watch the fire. One way to put things regarding his trailer is that austerity ruled it. I once visited the fire lookout on the south peak of Three Fingers and at night, when the view was no longer overwhelming, had a little of the same feeling I had in my friend’s mobile home on the Hoh. A paucity of objects makes a room feel bigger—that might be part of it. At any rate, besides the woodstove and lawn chairs, there was only a cable drum in John William’s front room, serving as a table; a wood block with a hatchet sunk in it; an antiquated vacuum cleaner; and some kindling and firewood. Our plates were on the drum, along with a box of kitchen matches, an open lockback knife, a water bottle, and a book called The Gnostic Religion, by a Hans Jonas. I know this is the full list of items, because that night, on the floor, in my sleeping bag, I made an entry in my journal. The lawn chairs, the cable drum, the wood block, the open woodstove: it was camping without the out-of-doors.
John William in his lawn chair, shoeless, bearded, his hair in his face, adjusting his fire by prodding it with kindling—that’s the picture I recall. And that we smoked our roaches through a hairpin that a former tenant of that mildewed hovel had lost in the pile of the carpet, and which John William had retrieved and saved. A college dropout who becomes a barefoot trailer-denizen, a child of advantage who turns to simplicity: that wasn’t such an unusual progression in the era of Gerald Ford, when the American woods were still full of young philosophers—and Vietnam vets—some of whom looked like Johnny Appleseed. My friend’s wool sweater was so filthy as to suggest, I thought, a freshly shorn fleece. It had been distended by wear into the shape of a loose hairshirt, or maybe a sackcloth, and its weave had segregated, and its sleeves had relaxed toward a conspicuous length that covered his hands, limply. But though John William had consolidated a look of self-inflicted penury, ultimately there was nothing to be done about the fact that his teeth still implied a white dinner jacket and mints. As for me, I was the current recipient of a higher education, someone who’d made a European tour, and a lover whose inamorata was an older woman, all of which meant, to me at least, that John William and I should recalibrate. But that wasn’t something amenable to force. In a friendship, you don’t so much change terms as observe terms changing. John William might have been barefoot in his lawn chair, but he still had intrinsic gravity and traction, whereas I felt weightless, as ever, in his orbit, even dressed as I was in fresh experience. In other words, what I’d done, or was doing, my friend seemed immune to; what mattered right now was his celebration of the gnostic scholar Jonas. Had I read Jonas?
“I’m reading Pope.”
“You should read Jonas.”
“I’ve got all this Pope I have to read.”
John William held his stick of kindling like a scepter. “You shouldn’t waste your time,” he warned.
Though I regaled John William with a description of Pope’s grotto, and of its associated tunnel beneath the London road—the vestiges of which my professor had photographed on a visit to Cross Deep—his interest in my consciousness remained less than perfunctory. What mattered was Jonas and, if I caught the gnostic drift of things, the cruel farce that was reality; to this the hunchbacked poet must play second fiddle. Later, we went outside to consider the stars, which are rarely seen on the Hoh, and I pointed out, cannabis-appropriately, how densely three-dimensional the Milky Way appeared, and how obvious it was to me that we were in it, but John William was immune to this celestial insight, too, and only stood there in his hairshirt, barefoot, and said, “That’s a satellite. They’re taking pictures for their files.”
“Somebody told me they can see smoke off your joint.”
“Satellites can see your thoughts, but not through rock,” John William replied.
Was this crazy? In the newspaper reports on the hermit of the Hoh, an abiding derangement is the heart of the matter. That’s wrong. My friend was just speaking in code about satellites—speaking in a language private between us. A vocabulary for intimates: some teens can talk between themselves so enigmatically that their shades of meaning are unavailable to—for example—me voyeuristically at the salad bar in the school cafeteria. “Satellites can see your thoughts, but not through rock,” is like something they might say. In John William’s case, it was conscious hyperbole and therefore commentary. At one level, it was reefer-inspired. It was partly for fun. It was other things, too—but not derangement. I give no credence to that interpretation, and I knew him better than anybody.
In my sleeping bag that night, with the woodstove ticking, I decided John William would tire of this seediness and eventually move on to something new—something full of suffering, if I had to predict, like crossing Patagonia with no food. I could also hear Alexander Pope calling. When would I read his many, clever couplets? That was his telepathic, intermittent complaint. “At your age, Pope was writing his Pastorals,” my professor had said, on the day before I drove to the Hoh. (Hagiography and admonishment, in equal measure, were staples of her lectures.) I’d been thinking about that and feeling disheartened. I felt condemned, after high school, to deeper failures, of graver consequence—or, to put this another way, I was ambitious.
The next morning, in John William’s Impala, we drove the Honor Camp Road, which crosses Elk Creek and rounds Mount Octopus, and then the Owl Creek Road, which parallels the upper Hoh below Huelsdonk Ridge. The potholes ended where a berm full of cobbles had been lofted by a grader, and where a hiker could set out on the South Fork Hoh Trail. John William put his car key in a snuff tin and, on the back side of a maple, hid it under moss, and then we stuffed some gear in our packs, tightened our boots, and made trail. There was sunlight on the alders, on the gravel bars, on the fallen trees at water’s edge, and on the water itself, but still the way was in shade for the most part. Wind was present, intermittently, as noise—not just leaves and branches but furtive groans, of the kind that augur tree fall. Finally, we came to a place by the river where four segments of a spruce lay like wrecked train cars against a hillside. Scenes like this in the forest form the sort of tableau that makes route-finding John William’s way—committing landmarks to memory—a little easier than it sounds. We kept a creek on our right, passed through cedars hung with withes, rested where John William and I had depleted his char cloth while failing to start a fire, even came on the scene of our stalemated chess game, but it was always a graphically fallen tree, or a boulder poised against another boulder, looking ready to topple—anything dramatic—that I remembered best and found reassuring. Corroboration was what I wanted, and now and then, when the map in my head and the configuration of the world converged on schedule, I felt comforted and vindicated, but more often I negotiated the terrain with doubts and moved forward taking compass headings and orienteering notes, in order to militate against an unmooring like the one I’d been through with John William before, and so we could turn back, if necessary, without relying on his recall of the country behind us. It made no difference, because he knew where he was going.
At the site of our blood pact, beneath the limestone wall and above our pool, John William announced that he was excavating a “cliff dwelling.” He’d built some tenuous-looking scaffolding, medi
eval and crude—really just some lashed-up limbs with a pronounced rightward cant. There were chips of limestone on the forest floor beneath it, made, he said, by his pick. I told him he was crazy. I said he was a fool. I told him he’d give up when his back was broken. We rested for a while, with our boots off and our feet in the pool, and then I followed John William up the scaffolding, and, picks in hand, we considered the raw concavity in the limestone, which, he said, was his work of the last two months. I looked down at his camp—his fire ring, his lean-to tarp, a line of nylon twine on which his socks were drying, and the pool lined with rock and brimming with clear water. In my view, this was a tidy illustration from a scouting manual. There were a number of drum canteens, with shoulder straps, hanging from a limb in shade, and when John William went to get one I tried swinging a pick a few times, and made some dents in the limestone, or, rather, small chalky nicks. Of course, the recalcitrance of stone doesn’t need elaboration. And there’s a reason why dynamite’s the tool of choice among miners. Limestone can be pulverized to make a soil amendment, but that doesn’t mean it’s amenable to force. A pick’s point will fatigue in a long match with rock, and a pick, with time, comes loose from its handle. I keep a pick in our garden shed, which I bought when we decided to do away with our carport, thinking I would use it to go after the concrete, but I ended up, before long, renting a jackhammer, lacking not so much strength as patience. Frankly, I’m probably unsuited to a war with hard materials, or, for that matter, to any labor of attrition, but I helped John William excavate his cave that day, taking my shifts on his haphazard scaffolding while feeling all the while that the effort was absurd. There were fossils in the rock, mostly small bivalves—I could see the clear imprints of their scalloped shells—and now and then a nodule of flint knapped off in a way suggestive of accelerating progress, but as for interests or satisfactions inherent in this toil, these were as meager as you’ll find in any project. “Like striking stone” is a simile for getting nowhere.
That evening, after John William used his fire drill, we sat by high flames. In the orange light against the rising rock face, his scaffolding looked even more primitive, like the apparatus of a night attack made by Goths on crenellated walls. I remember John William telling me that he’d driven to Port Angeles at one point in May to eat at the Elks Club and watch Chinatown at the Lincoln. It was clear that this humble evening constituted the apex of novel activity for him over the past sixty days. While I’d been cavorting in my apartment with Jamie, John William had mostly been chipping at rock, here in this gloomy forest. I think again of Basho—“The new year’s first snow: / how lucky to remain alone / at my hermitage”—but is this luck or something grim? That question, or one like it, was with me that night, and led me into reticence while John William, making use of the firelight, picked at the calluses on his palms, I would have to say obsessively. Later, I stumbled around gathering more branches to throw on the flames, and from between the trees looked back at his scaffolding and at the cliff, too, in the burnished glow. From that perspective, from that small distance, my friend’s enterprise appeared disturbing, partly because it was so small there, with so much darkness around it, and partly because the flickering of the fire caught the small facets and indentations of pick work but not the depth of it, and made it look even more futile than it looked when you saw it from close up, in daylight. On the other hand, I slaved over one of my unpublished novels for seven years. Is that more or less ridiculous than pick work?
In the morning, a light rain was falling against the tarp. At noon, we walked out—we headed toward the road—and near a swale full of downfall brush saw an elk moving away from us. We watched it go, and after a while it was clear that there were more elk, at least five, farther off and slowly retreating, too, unharried shadows, and I made some notes on this, on their red coats and “the furtive and even ethereal way” they disappeared and reappeared among the spruces. At the river we threw stones into the current, and I snared, on a stick, the carcass of a salmon, a fish whose remaining flesh hung “like a tattered ribbon” there was also a lone merganser “flying low and frenzied between the gravel bars and cutbanks.” My hands felt raw. My blood-pact scar, that crescent in my right palm, looked pink. We sat for a while by a bend in the water course and then walked the flats westward. The Impala came into sight. We caravanned into Forks and ate eggs and bacon in a booth. John William reprovisioned—including, I remember, two extra pick handles—and then I followed him to Port Angeles. At Swain’s, he bought overalls and rubber raingear, and we took his old clothes to a Laundromat and sat near the dryers eating cheeseburgers and reading a newspaper someone had left there. That night, at the Lincoln, we watched Death Wish, with Charles Bronson as an architect who becomes a vigilante. It was a Sunday, and I was starting summer classes the next morning, but despite that we drove out to Ediz Hook when the movie was over and sat on rocks by the salt water, looking back toward town. Port Angeles sits between the sea and the mountains, and because of this appears transitory when you see it from a distance, or small in its context. That’s what we saw, and light from the town illuminating a log boom. A lot of timber was floating in the water near a mill on the harbor. I said, “So what, exactly, is the deal with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what are you doing?”
“I don’t want to participate.”
“Participate in what?”
“In anything.”
His new overalls and flannel shirt, from Swain’s, made him look like a character from Oklahoma! while he sat on his rock examining his hands with more rigor, I thought, than they warranted. Behind him was the Strait of Juan de Fuca, some stars, and a container ship. I said, “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t get what?”
“I don’t get you.”
“I don’t get you, either.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Idiot,” said John William. “You’ve got your whole life in front of you, maybe fifty or sixty years. And what are you going to do with that? Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money, and then die?”
“No.”
“Neither am I,” said John William.
In the morning, I took notes while my professor gave an overview, up through the transcendentalists, of literature in America—its Puritan beginnings, the period of the deists, and the transcendentalists themselves, with their optimism—my professor said—goaded forward by the land westward that remained unknown to them. The idea seemed to me dubious. It still does, because a lot of people are indifferent to the unknown, and some are terrified of it, too—unknown lands aren’t by definition a reason to look on the bright side. So I considered this opening lecture a little unsatisfying and later, at the library, dug around about this question of transcendentalism in relation to the westward unknown, but there was so much there about related things that I couldn’t keep my original question in mind and got sidetracked, and really, this has been the story of my life, this sort of digression from what I intended, a manner of living that’s upsetting in a fundamental way, so that at times I’ve thought of striking out on a new path. But which path would that be? That’s now my $440-million question. COUNTRYMAN—GET OUT HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. There was more to that than I realized.
5
ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS
I CAN’T SAY HOW MANY TIMES John William swung his pick in order to excavate his cave. I do know that I hiked there frequently with heavy loads, and most of the time found him swinging it. Once, though, arriving in the evening, I found him sitting with a book I’d left under his tarp called One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Reading, John William looked like a character from the Brothers Grimm—the long hair and beard, the candle and book, the pool in the woods, the fire behind him and the cave overhead, the rising rock wall, and the dark trees. I said, “Some of those poems are good.”
He put the book down.
Working on his cave, John William developed big arms and a h
ulking back. He didn’t sweat as much as I did, but his sweat was gamier. One day, while helping him—or pretending to help him, because I still felt strongly that this project was folly—I suggested dynamite. I said we could pound holes in the rock and fill them with explosives. I was fantasizing about a way out because the work was so hard. I was also confronting a truly onerous tedium, which had come to include me against my will. In sum, I hated pick work. With pick work, each blow reverberates in the forearms, and as the day wears on, the curved head becomes heavier and the tool feels out of balance; whereas earlier there might have been a crushing exactitude, now there’s only flailing. I think of the chain gangs portrayed in films, bent along roads or in dusty fields, dressed in stripes and slowed by leg-irons, generally beneath a terrible sun, and though they often wield shovels or hoes, it’s the swing of picks that comes readily to mind as a natural feature of this celluloid image, because pick work is servitude, it’s penitential; I can imagine a circle of hell about pick work, but not about hoeing or shoveling. Anyway, when a day of cave building was done, John William and I sat by our flames, eating, on a lot of nights, beans and rice. There were limestone chips everywhere—they crunched underfoot and here and there caught firelight. A bluntness inhabited my hands: they felt like clubs and lost discernment. We were bug-bitten and smelled of sulfur. But we were also young and had our hot tub. Of course, this cave wasn’t really my project, and I could quit anytime, though, on the other hand, I felt compelled, or obliged, by a bond, by allegiance, and by the posture of service which, I admit, was the posture I took of my own choice toward John William.
But I was only there sporadically. My life unfolded in other places. I peddled firewood with Keith, attended school, and lived with Jamie. Gradually, I didn’t want to go to the South Fork Hoh, or I wanted to go but not urgently enough, partly because this life in town appealed to me, partly because excavating had gotten insufferable, and partly because of the rule, newly instituted by John William, that we couldn’t smoke dope until dusk. That fall of ’75, I made the pilgrimage infrequently, though always with a pack full of food—I remember buying hamhocks, pinto beans, apples, rice, and cookies, and weighing myself with and without this load, which came to seventy pounds. I also brought, on one trip, shampoo, soap, candles, toilet paper, and a can of white gas, and I laid these out on the forest floor, near the fire pit, and after a while—what choice did he have?—John William accepted my offerings and put everything under his tarp.