One spring when I showed up in his camp, my friend was smoking strips of elk meat in a miasma of smoke and blue-bottle flies. He looked skinny, dirty, scabbed, bruised, and scratched, and he had blistered lips, cold sores, and an infected eye. There was the smell in the air of singed flesh, and a peculiar odor I later learned was elk brains, with which John William planned to tan the hide. Bones, antlers, hooves, teeth, haunches of bloody meat, a bladder, some sinews—the pile of parts beside him was explicit. My friend was processing a five-hundred-pound mammal, which, when you think about it, is no small trick. By the butcher’s art, what was once whole is split, but not without a lot of gore, stench, and, if you’ve never seen an animal parted out before, news about anatomy. I sat upwind of the animal in question while John William’s foray as an elk smoker went poorly. He’d built a rack out of lashed branches, hung the meat from it by cedar cords, and set it downwind of his fire, and now, while keeping green wood on a cool blaze, was frustrated by his lack of temperature control. The fire would get so hot the meat would cook; then it would get so cool and smokeless the flies would descend. One rack of meat had already turned too black to eat. I tried some, but, as John William warned me, it tasted the way you would imagine cinders taste. We stayed up all night, modulating the fire and manipulating the distance and angle of the rack. As water left them, the strands of flesh shriveled and twisted. We made a few taste tests, but otherwise we stayed busy gathering green branches and, with prodding, aspiring toward a steady, cool smoke. I dried out at a slower rate than the meat did, and when I put my wrist to my nose the smell was of tinder. After thirty hours, John William was satisfied. We moved the meat onto a tautly strung line for air cooling, reloaded the rack, and smoked again, this time trying backstrap sliced thin as prosciutto and salted more heavily than the prior batch. Things went better, but it was still necessary to be constant at the fire, and to sleep in alternating snatches.
John William had found this elk, he said, in the woods to the north, in a dark hemlock forest, down on its flank and with two puncture wounds in its neck, but still warm. After milling beside it for forty-five minutes with his ice ax in his hand, he felt confident that its killer—it had to be a cougar—had chosen deference.
Satisfied, and making guesses and a lot of mistakes, he’d quartered the elk. He’d rolled up its antlers, teeth, bladder, hooves, and sinews in its hide. What he carried out first was a forequarter raggedly split off along the backbone and cut between the third and fourth ribs. When he came back, an hour later, toward dusk, to make a second run, a hindquarter was gone, and the liver and heart. John William hung the other hindquarter out of reach on a rope he’d brought, and tied up the hide as best he could, but when he came back the next morning, the hide had been nudged about twenty yards north of where he’d left it, turned over, and pawed at. His hung hindquarter was intact, but the other palatable remains were gone along the route of an obvious dragline, and there was scat nearby, the smell of cat urine, and flies working the offal.
His elk jerky, meant to last the winter, didn’t last until July. Nor did his “pemmican,” which was just a lot of pulverized elk flesh mixed with rendered elk fat and some yellow raisins we dried in the sun and tried to crush with a stone pestle. It went bad even faster than the jerky. John William thought he might have burned the fat, or not used enough of it; however it was, his “pemmican”—which looked like wax and sawdust—tasted rancid by June. As for the hide, I have to give John William credit. It turned out to be at least a modest success. He went at it the way he’d gone at building his cave. If his Guide to Wilderness Living advised him to remove the hair and epidermis with overlapping strokes a quarter-inch wide, he did that without cheating, and so did I, taking my turns. We fleshed, soaked, grained, and membraned; we stretched the hide, threw it in the hot tub and weighted it there with rocks, dragged it out and wrung it with twists, pulled it like taffy, bounced a stone on it as though it was a trampoline, beat it with a stick, rolled it over a rope between trees, and worked it over the base of a pick handle. We mixed the elk brains with water, and I ended up, later, at home, needing an antibiotic, because I didn’t wear gloves working brain mash into the hide. When I came back two weeks later, John William had made some inept-looking moccasins. They were so bad you could see his toes poking out of them. I brought him some glover’s needles and thick nylon thread, and he made himself an ill-fitting shirt. His tailoring was laughable. The shirt caught him at the armpits and puckered at mid-back. Some of its decorative fringes were wrongly placed and quickly burned to scorched nubs in his fire. To me, he looked like someone in a frontierish straitjacket, but he insisted on wearing it. It was at about this time that I began to realize how sad it was to see him. To pull into camp with my load of M&M’s, Top Ramen, Rye Krisps, Crest, and Evereadys, and find him yet again a little more devolved, a little more like one of those hominids I’d read about in Introduction to Physical Anthropology, was increasingly distressing. With his head coarsely sheared, his foot-long beard, his buckskin shirt, and his rudimentary moccasins, he was so flagrantly absurd, so filthy, so post-apocalyptic, and at the same time so evocative of the early-nineteenth-century American West as portrayed in a bad museum diorama, that anyone with the poor luck to come across him could not be blamed for assuming he’d gone comically mad, or maybe dangerously mad, or, if seeing him distantly, through trees, say in mist—say while crouching fearfully behind a log—that he had to be a figment or a flashback. But he was real, and, as I say, sadly so to me, because he seemed diminished and lacking in his prior fine luster. The fell-runner posture and the Gatsby-esque teeth were things of the past. His gums were swollen. His shoulders were small. I would find him in his cave at midday, in his sleeping bag, doing nothing at all, just picking at his cuticles and calluses and hawking spit; or I would find him sprawled by the fire with his head on his arm; or sitting under a tree as if he thought he was the Buddha. He argued now that there was a lot to be said for “conserving body fat,” as he put it, and for “the art of doing nothing,” but from my point of view he was just depressed. Which, I thought, reflected poorly on his mission. It hadn’t led to happiness.
That winter of ’84, I saw that in the empty spaces of his books he was making small drawings. If there was an available end or front page, he used it, or if a chapter started halfway down the page, he drew in the upper half, or if a poem ended with its final verse on an opposing page he filled the white space below it. His paint, or ink, was wood ash mixed with watered-down spruce pitch, and with this he could get shades of gray or black—though I noticed that his drawings were always of one color—and his brush was a raven’s wing bone tipped with elk hair bound to it with nylon thread. In my sleeping bag, with my headlamp on, I leafed systematically through his library. In none of his drawings was there anything like a direct representation of an object in the world, but, on the other hand, they weren’t abstract. The dots, dashes, lines, and daubs converged to imply, say, mountains in mist, or trees, or cliffs, or moving water. There were no human forms, and no symmetry or dynamism, just monochromatic still-lifes by suggestion, with the white space always put to work, and the paint applied supplely, like calligraphy ink. I thought this development, John William as artist, was at odds with how I knew him, but what would be the point of saying so? Even more unexpected was coming across this, written on the end page of Rabbit Is Rich, right after Updike’s illustrious bio:
Raven in my cave,
Mosquitoes whining at dusk—
This is what I have.
The next day, it snowed. We sat in the cave entrance wearing our sleeping bags like robes and watched the flakes float and wander. Snow began to settle on the forest floor wherever the canopy didn’t stop it. The shapes it made against the dirt were like a map of what was overhead. Arcs formed, articulating the lay of limbs. You could see the sweep of foliage in the undulating patterns. I’m obviously drawn to moments such as this, and don’t forget them, but, for better or worse, I’m equally drawn to wor
ds, so I said, sitting in the cave entrance with John William and watching snow fall,
Raven in my cave,
Mosquitoes whining at dusk—
This is what I have.
“I agree.”
“You want to play chess?”
“No.”
“I brought dope.”
“I’ve become a bad tripper. Dope gives me nightmares.”
I shuffled through my pack and found the National Book Award winner for fiction in ’84, Ellen Gilchrist’s Victory over Japan: A Book of Stories. “They dropped poetry,” I said. “I don’t know why.”
John William stretched a hand out as if to gauge the snow, or just to feel it melt against his fingers. He said, “This is bad.”
“What?”
“I’m going crazy up here.”
“Leave, then.”
“Leaving’s crazier.”
“That loses me, Barry.”
He didn’t answer.
I handed him Victory over Japan, because I didn’t know what else to do, but he said he didn’t want it and set it on the cave floor. I said, “I think you should bag it. What’s the point?”
He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, chuckling, then laughing, then laughing harder, as if whatever he was thinking seemed funnier all the time. He had to sigh and say, “Oh,” a few times to make his laughing stop, and then he said, “How could there be no poems this year? That’s insane.”
“I can always bring poems.”
“I mean, with all the crap in the world, and they cut poems?”
I said, “Name your poet.”
“Galway Kinnell.”
“Go out when I go out. Hike out with me.”
“The Book of Nightmares. Isn’t that a great title?”
I said, “Please.”
He gave me the finger. “You’re their emissary,” he said. “You’re the oldest trick in their book—a traitor.”
“Which ‘their’?”
“The Archons.”
“This is what I mean,” I said. “You need to bag it.”
“Bring poems by women,” said John William. “I want to know what women think. I want to understand women.”
“Meet one.”
“I do. You remember my dakini? The one from my dream?”
“Try to hear what I’m saying. Listen to me for once.”
“She’s blessed me with fear,” he said. “Fear’s my way out.”
I HAD TWO SONS by the winter of ’84. I was teaching Orwell in Modern English Literature—it was a good year for retrospectives—and I was adviser to the Chess Club. Jamie and I were installing a woodstove. I’d learned a few things about bicycle maintenance. We were short of money. Sometimes, on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, I sat in our bedroom with a yellow legal pad and worked longhand on short stories. Sometimes, instead, I raced strangers around Green Lake. One Sunday, in February, at dusk, I saw a runner far ahead of me moving at a rapid clip, fast enough that I’d lose sight of him in bends, so fast I grew disheartened in the straightaways about gaining enough ground to make him aware of my existence. It was getting dark. The wind was blowing from off the lake. Some overwintering ducks, in silhouette, fluttered in the reeds. I felt obstructed. It was not so much that he was pulling away as that I was receding. I thought he was wearing a sleeveless white singlet, warm-ups, and a headband, but he kept disappearing and reappearing, and anyway, in the gloom it was hard to tell much about him. My hope was that I would wear him down, but this didn’t happen. He ran the lake twice, and so did I, but I was always too far behind to feel like I was racing. We were running in darkness now. I tried to make a push near the bathhouse, but this was a delusion I believed in only briefly. Even so, I pushed myself until I lost control of my footing on a patch of ice and broke my left ankle. The next day, I taught sitting in a swivel chair, my cast on a coffee table borrowed from among the stage props in the school theater, and my crutches in my lap, so that I could use them when needed as a long-distance pointer. In American Studies, we were reading Thoreau, and one of my students, a girl who went on to Yale and now works for the State Department, was loudly amused by the image of Henry David tossing out his rock paperweight when he discovered he had to dust it. She said, “What a granola-head,” and “Why are we reading this?” An argument ensued about abundance, leisure, work, nature, and what a second girl kept calling “the American way.” When I asked her what she meant by “the American way,” she said, “Basically, the destruction of everything—the world, your happiness, your soul, everything. The complete package. Evil and war. That’s who we are, Mr. Countryman.”
JOHN WILLIAM DIED. I’m not going to indulge anyone’s interest in forensic details. If you’re fascinated by charnel-house specifics, the vocabulary of coroners, or the undertaker’s daily bread, forgive my reticence. I’ll say plainly that I found him on May 4, 1984, after having overdone it on my not-quite-recovered ankle. I shouldn’t have made the journey, but after eleven weeks, I was worried. And rightly so, because he was facedown across his fire pit, with his midsection charred and his arms in front of him as if reaching for something. He’d burned in his own fire, why or how I’ll never know, though I could speculate that, weakened by hunger, he’d stumbled, maybe, and that—maybe, or maybe not—this stumbling was suicide. Does it go without saying that writing this is hard for me? Regret for what you did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, after someone dies—I have that and expect I’ll always have it. I should have spoken up, if not before I broke my ankle, certainly after, because I’d known—sitting on the couch at home, correcting essays, with my casted foot on the coffee table—that John William’s situation was dire. Yet I couldn’t turn him in. There was a part of me, at twenty-eight, with a wife, two kids, a house, a dog, and a job, that agreed with him, and so I couldn’t make the call. I started to, a couple of times, but then I convinced myself that dying up there was preferable to granting Jehovah another victory, and set the phone down. Jamie didn’t agree. She wanted to call Olympic Park and tell someone about the maniac in the woods who was up there, right now, starving to death, but I asked her not to do that, and, to her regret, she listened to me.
Alone in the mountains, I was spooked by my friend’s corpse and had to sit for a long time at a considerable remove, not looking, looking, then looking away again, and, amid all this, wondering why I wasn’t crying. There were five ravens in the trees. I’m not going to say what work they’d done, only that they were eyeing me with inscrutable patience. After a while, I moved closer to the remains and stood there with my left arm across my gut and my right elbow resting on it so I could keep my palm against my mouth and my thumb and forefinger pinching shut my nostrils. I could see how he’d been sitting by his fire, reading, and had stood up and fainted—maybe—because beside his legs was a canteen, and out in front of his hands, in the dirt, was One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Even this didn’t make me cry, the thought of John William, at the hour of his death, reading Tu Fu or some other Chinese poet who’d been dead for a thousand years. To the contrary, it was something I was glad about.
After about an hour, I accepted things as they were. What choice did I have? When I thought of walking away from what was left of him, it felt wrong, so I stayed, climbed the ladder, and got a shovel. I took apart his ring of fire stones and threw the smaller ones at the ravens, but they didn’t fly off, only moved to other branches. Determined not to disturb John William’s remains, I shoveled out all the partly burned wood I could get at without touching him, spread the ashes I could reach, and groomed the forest floor nearby. I put his canteen, book, and shovel in the cave and came back with a cedar mat, which I laid out close to his left side and wriggled and tucked under him the best I could. But now I had to sit at a remove again, for another ten or fifteen minutes. I got my gloves out of my pack, and a bandanna, and I tied the bandanna across my nose and put the gloves on, but still I sat at my small distance, with my back against the cliff, my elbows on my knees, and my swollen ankle
hurting, and said his name a few times. Inured by this, or a little inured, I got up, reluctantly, and did what I thought I should do, which was to shove John William’s remains onto the mat and roll them up, and while I was doing this I finally cried a little. Shoving him like that, no matter how respectfully I tried to do it, injured my sense of funereal propriety, and the feel of his weight against my gloved hands, the way he seemed to push back, his mass, the glimpse I had of his beard, of an ear, of the whorl of hair at the crown of his head—these are the images and sensations I remember. I had to shut my eyes and rudely assert myself, unceremoniously, the way you might with a roadkill deer, to get him where I thought he should go. After that it was a little like rolling up heavy carpet, except that making that first turn, rotating his weight until he was shrouded and gone, was like the moment when my mother’s coffin began to descend. The literal disappearance is, for me, the worst part of a funeral.
He fit. I cinched him up with his handmade cedar cords and made a bound bundle. It was like tying down a sleeping bag in the era before stuff sacks. Then I had to sit some more, at a distance again, and look away from John William’s cylindrical sarcophagus and let expire from my hands the feeling of pulling knots tight against the pressure of his corpse. The ravens were gone now. I wanted to walk out and be on the road with the radio playing and the dash lights glowing before night fell, but, again, it was necessary to accept things as they were. I made myself look at the lozenge I’d constructed, and then I made myself sit close to it and felt frightened of the supernatural, of the possible but impossible resurrection of the dead, and of the woods themselves. So it was a long time before I put a hand on the rolled mat, and then my other hand, and bent my head to it with the bandanna over my nose, through which the smell of cedar now muted some of the other smells, and with this step-by-step approach I was eventually able to lean the side of my face against my friend’s bark coffin and rest like that, if rest is the word for what I was doing. I can’t tell you exactly what I was doing, but, once again, it seemed right.