Is there a difference? The difference is that I bought a used snowmobile which I could run up a corrugated aluminum ramp (donated by Keith, whose ATV and dirt bike were both permanently disabled) and secure to my stakebed with cargo straps. I dropped Intermediate Short Story Writing and Late 19th Century American Literature, substituting for them Renaissance Drama and Greek Lyric Poetry, so that my Fridays were free for winter quarter. Rescheduled, I drove to Forks on the second Thursday in January 1978—John William’s first winter in the Olympic Mountains—stayed in the motel, and, on Friday, at first light, drove as far as I could toward the South Fork Hoh before running my snowmobile down Keith’s ramp and blitzing toward the trailhead. This was my first ride on a motorized sled. The machine wouldn’t track. It was loaded with my pack, snowshoes, and a large box of tools, and its windshield was scratched. It kept wanting to turn sideways, and its shocks needed a rebuild. Its muffler was shot, but that didn’t matter, because no one was around in those woods but me, and I had on the earmuffs I used with my Homelite. At first, I felt precarious through every road bend, but then I discovered the foot pockets and, throttling up, found my balance. Cutting through all that untouched snow while sitting on a hot engine made me giddy. It also made me think of the scene from Dr. Strangelove in which Slim Pickens rides an H-bomb out of a B-52. At a midnight show a few years before, as Pickens, holding his hat and whooping like a cowboy, plummeted toward Russia, John William leaned in and told me that his father was one of the engineers responsible for the B-52’s wing design. I thought of that, too, screaming along on my snowmobile, but mostly I was busy trying not to ski off the road.
Walking in, at first, wasn’t bad. I traversed, downhill, to the riverbank, and snowshoed the gravel bars—the sort of open-country travel, in sun, near water, that is, to quote Wordsworth again, full of glimpses that would make me less forlorn. No one but me had touched that snow, other than birds, elk, and a bobcat, lynx, or cougar—I couldn’t tell which. I’m not good at reading tracks, but these, whatever they were, looked as well defined as diagrams, and the paths they took, toward the water or forest, were interwoven with, I imagined, hunger and wariness. I realized then that my tracks were graphic, too, gigantically so, and my thoughts, as I shoed, became ponderously shrewder, less inclined toward ambience and more toward evasion, though at the same time I couldn’t take seriously the prospect of someone’s tailing me. I thought of Vance Reese, James Bond–like, on skis, slipping through the woods above with binoculars, and dapper in a Swiss parka and mirrored glasses. But then back to the serious problem at hand, which was how to disappear when every step I took had a spotlight on it.
I’ve mentioned before that place by the river, mentally marked, where four segments of a spruce lay like wrecked train cars against a hillside, and that this is where, keeping a tributary on my right, I characteristically left the trail to climb to the cave. Not this time. This time, getting out of my snowshoes, I crossed the tributary on a log, buckled in again, and shoed up the South Fork Hoh another mile, to where a dozen or more spruces, gouged from a bank, had collapsed, roots and all, into the water. If someone was interested—and I didn’t think someone was—they could brood over my disappearance amid such debris, but that brooding wouldn’t lead them to John William Barry, especially if I walked on the snowy downed trees until my boot prints composed a kind of labyrinth.
I did all of that, and then I backtracked in the water. I waded. I stayed off the snow. I got wet. I only knew what I knew, and what I knew was from television. You throw dogs off your scent, escape cops with flashlights, evade vigilantes, befuddle the infantry, and, basically, outsmart all the stupid people in the world who want to treat you badly, by wading. So that’s what I did. I slogged back downstream with frozen feet, carrying my snowshoes, in the South Fork of the Hoh, and then, where the segments of spruce lay against the hillside, I slogged up the tributary a quarter-mile, and sat on my pack with my feet wrapped in a sweater before changing socks. This whole morning, from my snowmobile charge up an inundated road to my watery deception, was fun and lonely.
I shoed into camp at midafternoon and dropped my huge pack on the snow. In the cave entrance, the cedar curtain was dropped, but as I stood there wiping the sweat from my face it rolled up a little and John William popped his head out. “I thought you were a bear,” he said.
“Bears hibernate.”
I explained my ruse. I told him about the snowmobile. He looked at me the way the doorman at the Emerald City looked at Dorothy while she pleaded for admittance. Then I opened my pack and tossed up to him a box of chocolate-covered cherries wrapped in cellophane. “My sister gave me those for Christmas,” I said. “She buys them on sale at Pay ’n Save.”
John William said, “A snowmobile.”
“It was fifty bucks.”
“You know you have to wade back to those downed trees on your way out.”
“Fine.”
“Chocolate-covered cherries?”
“I ate your Almond Roca about an hour ago. But I still have this.” And I tossed up a bottle of kirsch.
He put the ladder down, then pulled it up after I’d climbed in. We sat wrapped in sleeping bags with a lit candle between us, drinking kirsch from the bottle and eating the candies. John William had a scab on his cheek about the size of a prune. His fingernails were bitten down. His sweater was unraveling. He had on his hat, and his bag was pulled so tightly around his neck that only his face showed, with its scraggly beard. Otherwise, things remained fastidious—his gear and supplies, his hand tools and ditty bags: all was in tidy order. I counted cans again: twenty-eight. They were arrayed in a pyramid, its base seven twenty-four-ouncers of SpaghettiOs. On the other hand, John William still had most of the leek soup and all the bouillon cubes. I gave him the half-dozen hiker’s freeze-dried meals Keith had given me for Christmas (which I could tell came from the discount bin at Outdoor Emporium). I gave John William rice, pinto beans, powdered milk, pilot crackers, dried apricots, and a bag of carrots. I gave him the book I had along, which was a paperback edition of Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems. Finally, I gave him the special holiday issue of Penthouse, with its cover photo of a brunette in black lingerie drinking champagne from a tall glass, and its lead article on “The Real President Behind Carter.” I shook all of this out of my pack and onto a cedar mat, as if I was a trader. John William went for the carrots.
For hours, we lay in our sleeping bags, talking. It was cold, but no colder than most winter camping, and there was always the hot tub. We nursed the kirsch and smoked hash. John William wolfed down a lot of pilot crackers and dried apricots. I asked him if he knew what day it was, and he said no, so I told him it was Friday, January 13, 1978, to which he replied, “Paraskavedekatriaphobia.”
“What?”
“Fear of Friday the 13th.”
I said that, while he’d been in the woods, ABBA had set the record for albums sold. We mulled whether a computer could ever beat a chess champion, John William pointing out that chess demanded not only computation but a sense of irony. I confessed to spending some of the $70,000 on the hash we were smoking before giving him an account of my laundering scheme. First Seattle Dexter Horton and Best Trust and Savings—the banks founded, respectively, by his paternal grandfather and his maternal great-grandfather—were now repositories of laundered cash, and John William was glad to hear about this, that some of the money had been parked in those institutions, right under the noses, and in the account books, of his “weaseling, demonic forefathers.” “So what happened to charity?” he asked.
“I can’t exactly walk into the Red Cross with a bag of cash.”
“You’re giving it to the Red Cross?”
“Not necessarily,” I said, and immediately his fresh use of the word “weaseling” came to mind.
He got up on one forearm to light the hash pipe with the candle. Then he lay back, waited, and exhaled toward the ceiling while tugging at his beard. It was so cold in the cave that, between the ha
sh smoke and his vapor, John William was like a human fog machine. His exhalation looked like a jet’s contrail. He said, “Give it to a Buddhist monastery.”
“How come?”
“Those guys need it.”
“What for?”
“They want to row us to the other side.”
Later, we had our fun with the Penthouse. “Miss December’s most recently read book is Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She’s currently a spokesperson for the Sisters of Mercy. She enjoys big-game hunting in a thong.” And so on. We finished the kirsch, and after that, standing in the cave entrance and unzipping to relieve myself, I fell ten feet into the snow. My lip got cut, but otherwise it was the kind of fall you can have when you’re drunk—painless and exhilarating. “Whilst alive,” wrote Basho, “I enjoy my wine and keep repeating to myself ‘tomorrow, tomorrow,’ until I’m rebuked by the sages.” John William sent the ladder down for me.
I PUT MONEY into the snowmobile, and kept it under a tarp. Keith liked tinkering with it, and replaced the track and a cracked engine mount after he’d borrowed it for a weekend. I took it up the South Fork Hoh at the end of January, and this time I brought John William a pair of bearpaw snowshoes, a garage-sale bow saw, a can of white gas, toilet paper, and as much food as I could stuff into my new expedition pack. It had snowed more, my old tracks were gone, and this time I had with me knee-high waders big enough for two pairs of socks. More spruces had come loose from the bank, and the pile in the river looked impossibly snarled. I’d bought a copy of Reading Animal Tracks, and though this was useful, what I really needed was Reading Animal Shit, since I couldn’t make much of the scat I found on the hard, icy snow in the shadows. It snowed while I herringboned, sweating in my rain pants and track jersey. I was so heavy under my back-breaking Sherpa load I postholed constantly, despite my snowshoes, and left deep shafts behind after crawling out. In camp, I dropped my pack as though it was a bag of cement and sat on it, wiping my face with a bandanna, until John William climbed down his ladder, wearing the parka and gloves I’d given him. “You fool,” he said. “It’s snowing.” We stood around eating salami, cheese, rolls, broccoli, oranges, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Then we dug out the fire pit, started a blaze, and shoveled free a wide swath of ground. For an hour, we soaked in the hot tub like Finns, getting out every once in a while to toss wood on the flames, and dunking now and then to clear the snow from our heads. In fact, pale, bearded, and in need of a shampoo, John William looked a little like a Finn—like one of those cadaverous, long-ago Finns in the illustrated Kalevala. He looked archaic, and so white you could see the blue map of arteries beneath his skin. You could see the points of his breastbones, too, because he’d lost so much weight. When I told him I thought he looked like a pencil-neck, he said that he felt fine “trimmed down like this,” that he never got sick now, that winter agreed with him, that the cold and the dearth of food had cleared his head, and so on. Nevertheless, he appeared raw and chafed, and ghostly in the sulfurous mist. He might have been a pauper in Helsinki, if Helsinki had paupers, someone who’d gathered enough coppers together for a rare visit to a public bath.
I said, “The average person would go crazy here.”
“I’m going crazy.”
“So throw in the towel.”
“I don’t throw towels, Neil. I never throw a towel. Put my head in a wringer, I wouldn’t throw a towel.”
John William lowered his face into the water. When he came up he said, “You do what you have to do, but no one’s getting me. Life’s short. Eternity’s long. I’m going to slip past God—he can’t get me.”
“Slip past God?”
“To the mother of us all.”
“You sound like a loon.”
“No,” said John William, “that part’s clear.”
It was this sort of thing that was starting to worry me in a way I hadn’t worried before. He’d been in his cave for ten months now, and he was beginning to sound like a street-corner mystic or a midnight caller to an AM talk show. But I didn’t tell him this. I bit my tongue, hoping that it was a phase, and that with warmer weather he might do better. And I went up there a lot. By March, there were new trees across the trail with branches full of melting snow, but I kept going, clambering over obstacles. I carried the old shortwave radio I’d hauled around on my shoulder the summer my mother died, but from the cave we couldn’t get reception on any of its bands. I packed it out again, and brought up, instead, on my next trip, with extra batteries, a portable cassette player, plus The Band, The Knack, The Cure, The Doors, and four lectures on modern physics. I kept John William in porn, I bought him new underwear, I scored pot in his name, I gave him Neruda’s “The Heights of Machu Picchu” and William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All.” In late April, I saw two anglers standing in the river, intent-looking sportsmen in separate bends, but they didn’t see me; other than that, my only company on those heavily laden journeys were the gray jays, ravens, and squirrels.
Jamie and I got married on June 17, the day after I graduated with a B.A. in English, in the small Arboretum gazebo. Erin read from Frost’s “The Master Speed” (“…life is only life forevermore / Together wing to wing and oar to oar”), and my father, because we asked him to, from Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets.” Afterward, there was a reception at Tillicum Village, lavishly hosted by Jamie’s parents, neither of whom was happy about the fact that this wedding wasn’t held in Pocatello. The Countrymans made their long-winded toasts, and the party lined up for salmon and red potatoes, and later for the wedding cake, chosen by Jamie’s mother, which was five tiers of fondant topped with sugar roses. Keith caught Jamie’s garter with a lunge, wore it as a wristband for the rest of the night, and, while dancing recklessly with Pocatello belles, shook it like a tambourine above his thick Irish head. At the microphone, arms tightly around Jamie’s shoulders, Walt Shaw noted that his daughter was independent, had a mind of her own, was headstrong even as a girl—as “a tyke”—but now seemed to have succumbed a little to someone called Neil Countryman. “Not so,” cut in Jamie. “No succumbing.”
The next day, we drove the Datsun to Anacortes and rode the ferry through the San Juan Islands to Victoria, where we stayed at the Empress, took afternoon tea, and ate a slow dinner on the veranda. In the morning, we drove to Tofino, where we’d reserved a cottage. We slept in the afternoon there, and walked the trails, and rowed to Meares Island to look at the harbor seals, and then we went home, and except for the rings on our fingers and our new possessions—kitchen gear, fluffy towels, vases, etc.—nothing was different.
I remember that one evening, shortly after returning from Tofino, I had dinner with my father, and heard him say, because I didn’t have a job, “With an English degree and a nickel you can get a cup of coffee.” I told him that coffee was more like a quarter now. I didn’t say that I was flush with cash and planned to spend the summer writing. That spring, I’d started sending short stories to literary periodicals with a cover letter describing myself as unpublished, and that summer, I started getting them back. I wasn’t ready to give up, though, and started keeping a chart to track where I’d sent what. I also got distracted by visits to used-book stores, especially Shorey’s, which no longer exists but was once a place of close-shelved magnitude and of occasional good deals if you were willing to dig, which I was, because I liked it in there, cool and dark as it felt on a hot day. Shorey’s was a warren, and it smelled antiquarian; half a million titles were arranged there with no real logic, and after spending an inordinate amount of time lost among them, squatting in corners and perched on scarred stools, I liked to go to the Athenian for a dark beer spiked with Peychaud’s Bitters, pull out my notebook, and write self-consciously, like Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. Still I got rejection notices: “There’s a strong sense of passivity in this that I think is due in large part to the heavy reliance on the subjunctive/past conditional,” and “One hopes for some forward movement, Earl working through to his redemption.” These went in
a file. I started a novel but quit ten days later. Near the end of August, I walked from our apartment to the UW’s College of Education, and applied.
That fall, while I was taking Introduction to Pedagogy, Developing Curriculum, and Strategies in Evaluation, John William was—for example—approximating soap out of fire-pit ash, grease reserved from a salami I’d brought him, rainwater, and salt. I remember pulling into his camp on a Saturday and finding him at this effort. He said it was his third try; rodents and insects had gotten one batch, and his recipe had been off for another. His beard was full of ash as he leaned over the fire, hair falling dangerously close to the flames, and measured out grease and lye water. On a flat rock nearby were lined up empty cans, into which he planned to pour his mixture.