Jack Kerouac
THE DHARMA BUMS
PENGUIN
BOOKS
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three
children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public
schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City,
where he first met Neal Cassady, Alien Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He
quit school in his sophomore year after a dispute with his football coach and
joined the Merchant Marine, beginning the restless wanderings that were to
continue for the greater part of his life. His first novel, The Town and the
City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in
1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the
world what became known as "the Beat generation" and made Kerouac one
of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of
his many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The
Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered them all to be part
of The Duluoz Legend. "In my old age," he wrote, "I
intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave
the long shelf full of books there, and die happy." He died in St.
Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.
Hopping a
freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay
down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the
clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara. It was a local and I intended to
sleep on the beach at Santa Barbara that
night and catch either another local to San Luis Obispo the next morning
or the firstclass freight all the way to
San Francisco at seven p.m. Somewhere near
Camarillo where Charlie Parker'd been mad and relaxed back to normal
health, a thin old little bum climbed into my
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gondola as we headed into a siding to
give a train right of way and looked surprised to see me there. He
established himself at the other end of the gondola and lay down, facing me,
with his head on his own miserably small pack and said nothing. By and by they blew the highball whistle
after the eastbound freight had smashed
through on the main line and we pulled out as the air got colder and fog
began to blow from the sea over the warm
valleys of the coast. Both the little bum and I, after unsuccessful attempts to huddle on the cold steel in
wraparounds, got up and paced back
and forth and jumped and flapped arms at each our end of the gon. Pretty soon
we headed into another siding at a
small railroad town and I figured I needed a poor-boy of Tokay wine to
complete the cold dusk run to Santa Barbara.
"Will you watch my pack while I run over there and get a bottle of
wine?"
"Sure thing."
I jumped over the side and ran
across Highway 101 to the store, and
bought, besides wine, a little bread and candy. I ran back to my freight train which had another
fifteen minutes to wait in the now warm sunny scene. But it was late
afternoon and bound to get cold soon. The little bum was sitting crosslegged
at his end before a pitiful repast of one can of
sardines. I took pity on him and went over and said, "How about a
little wine to warm you up? Maybe you'd like some bread and cheese with your sardines."
"Sure thing." He spoke
from far away inside a little meek voice-box
afraid or unwilling to assert himself. I'd bought the cheese three days
ago in Mexico City before the long cheap bus trip across Zacatecas and Durango
and Chihuahua two thousand long miles to the
border at El Paso. He ate the cheese and
bread and drank the wine with gusto and gratitude. I was
5
pleased. I reminded myself of the line
in the Diamond Sutra that says, "Practice charity without holding in mind any conceptions
about charity, for charity after all is just a word." I was very devout in those days and was practicing my
religious devotions almost to
perfection. Since then I've become a little hypocritical about my
lip-service and a little tired and cynical. Because now I am grown so old and
neutral. . . . But then I really believed
in the reality of charity and kindness and humility and zeal and
neutral tranquillity and wisdom and ecstasy, and I believed that I was an
oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering
the world (usually the immense triangular arc of New York to Mexico City to San Francisco) in order to turn
the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future
Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise. I had not met Japhy Ryder
yet, I was about to the next week, or heard anything about "Dharma Bums" although at this time I
was a perfect Dharma Bum myself and considered myself a religious wanderer. The
little bum in the gondola solidified all my beliefs by warming up to the wine
and talking and finally whipping out a tiny slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after her death she will return to the earth
by showering it with roses from
heaven, forever, for all living creatures.
"Where did you get this?" I asked.
"Oh, I
cut it out of a reading-room magazine in Los Angeles couple of
years ago. I always carry it, with me."
"And you squat in boxcars and read it?"
"Most every day." He
talked not much more than this, didn't amplify on the subject of Saint Teresa,
and was very modest about his religion and
told me little about his personal life.
He is the kind of thin quiet little bum nobody pays much
6
attention
to even in Skid Row, let alone Main Street. If a cop hustled him off, he
hustled, and disappeared, and if yard dicks were around in bigcity yards when a
freight was pulling out, chances are they never got a sight of the little man
hiding in the weeds and hopping on in the shadows. When I told him I was
planning to hop the Zipper firstclass freight train the next night he said,
"Ah you mean the Midnight Ghost."
"Is that what you call the Zipper?"
"You musta been a railroad man on that
railroad."
"I was, I was a brakeman on the S.P."
"Well, we bums call it the
Midnight Ghost cause you get on it at L.A. and nobody sees you till you get to
San Francisco in the morning the thing flies
so fast."
"Eighty
miles an hour on the straightaways, pap."
"That's right but it gits
mighty cold at night when you're flyin up that coast north of Gavioty and up
around Surf."
"Surf that's right, then the mountains down south of
Margarita."
"Margarity,
that's right, but I've rid that Midnight Ghost more times'n I can count I guess."
"How
many years been since you've been home?"
"More years than I care to
count I guess. Ohio was where I was
from."
But the train got started, the
wind grew cold and foggy again, and we spent
the following hour and a half doing everything in our power and will
power not to freeze and chatter-teeth too much. I'd huddle and meditate on the
warmth, the actual warmth of God, to obviate the cold; then I'd jump up and
flap my arms and legs and sing. But the little bum had more patience than I had
and just lay there most of the time chewing his cud in forlorn bitterlipped
thought. My teeth
7
were chattering, my lips blue. By dark we saw with relief
the familiar mountains of Santa Barbara taking shape and soon we'd be stopped
and warm in the warm starlit night by the tracks.
I bade farewell to the little bum of
Saint Teresa at the crossing, where we jumped off, and went to sleep the night in the sand
in my blankets, far down the beach at the foot of a cliff where cops wouldn't
see me and drive me away. I cooked hot-dogs
on freshly cut and sharpened sticks over the coals of a big wood fire, and
heated a can of beans and a can of cheese macaroni in the redhot
hollows, and drank my newly bought wine, and exulted in one of the most
pleasant nights of my life. I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood
looking up at the splendorous night sky, Avalokitesvara's ten-wondered universe
of dark and diamonds. "Well, Ray," sez I, glad, "only a few
miles to go. You've done it again." Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red
fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's
the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh
of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting
on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you
can't hold them in your hands, just use
good old railroad gloves, that's all. I let the food cool a little to
enjoy more wine and my thoughts. I sat crosslegged in the sand and
contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make?
"What's going to happen to me up ahead?" Then the wine got to work on
my taste buds and before long I had to pitch into those hotdogs, biting them
right off the end of the stick spit, and chomp chomp, and dig down into the two
tasty cans with the old pack spoon, spooning up rich bites of hot beans and
pork, or of macaroni with
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sizzling hot sauce, and maybe a little sand thrown in.
"And how many grains of sand are there on this beach?" I think.
"Why, as many grains of sand as there are stars in that sky!" (chomp
chomp) and if so "How many human beings have there been, in fact how many
living creatures have there been, since before the less part of
beginningless time? Why, oy, I reckon you would have to calculate the number of
grains of sand on this beach and on every star in the sky, in every one of the
ten thousand great chilicosms, which would be a number of sand grains
uncomputable by IBM and Burroughs too, why boy I don't rightly know" (swig
of wine) "I don't rightly know but it
must be a couple umpteen trillion sextillion infideled and busted up
unnumberable number of roses that sweet
Saint Teresa and that fine little old man are now this minute showering
on your head, with lilies."
Then, meal done, wiping my lips
with my red bandana, I washed up the dishes
in the salt sea, kicked a few clods of sand, wandered around, wiped
them, put them away, stuck the old spoon back in the salty pack, and lay down
curled in my blanket for a night's good and
just rest. Waking up in the middle of the night, "Wa? Where am I,
what is the basketbally game of eternity the girls are playing here by me in
the old house of my life, the house isn't on fire is it?" but it's only
the banding rush of waves piling up higher closer high tide to my blanket bed. "I be as hard and old as a
conch shell," and I go to sleep and dream that while sleeping I use
up three slices of bread breathing. . . . Ah poor mind of man, and lonely man
alone on the beach, and God watching with intent smile I'd say. . . . And I
dreamed of home long ago in New England, my
little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road
across America, and my mother with a pack on her
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back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable
train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray
dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a
sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its
reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same
thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embrace-able during sleep.
The little Saint Teresa bum was
the first genuine Dharma Bum I'd met, and the second was the number one Dharma
Bum of them all and in fact it was he, Japhy Ryder, who coined the phrase.
Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the
woods with his father and mother and sister, from the beginning a woods boy, an
axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he finally
got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for Ms early
studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth and in the actual texts of
Indian mythology. Finally he learned Chinese and Japanese and became an
Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen
Lunatics of China and Japan. At the same time, being a Northwest boy with idealistic
tendencies, he got interested in
oldfashioned I.W.W. anarchism and learned
to play the guitar and sing old worker songs to go with his
Indian songs and general folksong
interests. I first saw him walking down the street in San Francisco the
following week (after hitchhiking the rest of the way from Santa Barbara in one
long zipping ride given me, as though anybody'll believe this, by a beautiful
darling young blonde in a snow-white strapless bathing suit and barefooted with
a gold bracelet on her ankle, driving a next-year's cinnamon-red Lincoln Mercury, who wanted benzedrine so she could
drive all the way to the City and when I said I had some in my duffel bag
yelled "Crazy!") —I saw Japhy loping along in that curious long
stride of the mountainclimber, with a small
knapsack on his back filled with books and toothbrushes and
whatnot which was his small "goin-to-the-city" knapsack as apart from
his big full rucksack complete with sleeping bag, poncho, and cookpots. He wore
a little goatee, strangely Oriental-looking with his
somewhat slanted green eyes, but he didn't look like a Bohemian at
all, and was far from being a Bohemian (a
hanger-onner around the arts). He was wiry, suntanned, vigorous, open,
all howdies and glad talk and even yelling hello to bums on the street and when
asked a question answered right off the bat from the top or bottom of his mind
I don't know which and always in a sprightly sparkling way.
"Where did you meet Ray
Smith?" they asked him when we walked into The Place, the favorite bar of
the hepcats around the Beach.
"Oh I always meet my
Bodhisattvas in the street!" he yelled, and ordered beers.
It was a great night, a historic
night in more ways than one. He and some other poets (he also wrote poetry and
translated Chinese and Japanese poetry into English) were scheduled to
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give a poetry reading at the Gallery Six in town. They were
all meeting in the bar and getting high. But as they stood and sat around I saw
that he was the only one who didn't look like a poet, though poet he was
indeed. The other poets were either hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah
Goldbook, or delicate pale handsome poets like Ike O'Shay (in a suit), or
out-of-this-world genteel-looking Renaissance
Italians like Francis DaPavia (who looks like a young priest), or
bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fuds like Rheinhold Cacoethes, or big fat
bespectacled quiet booboos like Warren Coughlin. And all the other hopeful
poets were standing around, in various costumes, worn-at-the-sleeves corduroy
jackets, scuffly shoes, books sticking out of their pockets. But Japhy was in
rough worlungman's clothes he'd bought secondhand in Goodwill stores to serve
him on mountain climbs and hikes and for
sitting in the open at night, for campfires, for hitchhiking up and down
the Coast. In fact in his little knapsack he also had a funny green
alpine cap that he wore when he got to the foot of a mountain, usually with a
yodel, before starting to tromp up a few thousand feet. He wore mountain-climbing boots, expensive ones, his pride and joy,
Italian make, in which he clomped around over the sawdust floor of the
bar like an oldtime lumberjack. Japhy wasn't big, just about five foot seven,
but strong and wiry and fast and muscular. His face was a mask of woeful bone, but his eyes twinkled like the eyes
of old giggling sages of China, over that little goatee, to offset the rough
look of his handsome face. His teeth were a little brown, from early
backwoods neglect, but you never noticed that and he opened his mouth wide to
guffaw at jokes. Sometimes he'd quiet down
and just stare sadly at the floor, like a man whittling. He was merry at times. He showed great sym-
12
pathetic interest in me and in the story about the little
Saint Teresa bum and the stories I told him about my own experiences hopping
freights or hitchhiking or hiking in woods. He claimed at once that I was a
great "Bodhisattva," meaning "great wise being" or
"great wise angel," and that I was ornamenting this world with my sincerity. We had the same favorite
Buddhist saint, too: Avalokitesvara, or, in Japanese, Kwan-non the
Eleven-Headed. He knew all the details of Tibetan, Chinese, Mahayana,
Hinayana, Japanese and even Burmese Buddhism but I warned him at
once I didn't give a goddamn about the mythology and all the names and national
flavors of Buddhism, but was just interested in the first of Sakyamuni's four
noble truths, All life is suffering. And to an extent interested in the third, The suppression of suffering
can be achieved, which I didn't quite believe was possible then. (I hadn't
yet digested the Lankavatara
Scripture which eventually shows you that there's nothing in the world but the
mind itself, and therefore all's
possible including the suppression of suffering.) Japhy's buddy was the
aforementioned booboo big old goodhearted Warren Coughlin a hundred and eighty
pounds of poet meat, who was advertised by Japhy (privately in my ear) as being more than meets the eye. "Who
is he?"
"He's my big best friend from up in Oregon, we've
known each other a long time. At first you think he's slow and stupid but
actually he's a shining diamond. You'll see. Don't let him cut you to
ribbons. He'll make the top of your head fly away, boy, with a
choice chance word." "Why?" "He's
a great mysterious Bodhisattva I think maybe a rein-
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carnation
of Asagna the great Mahayana scholar of the old centuries."
"And
who am I?"
"I dunno, maybe you're Goat."
"Goat?"
"Maybe you're Mudface."
"Who's Mudface?"
"Mudface
is the mud in your goatface. What would you say if someone was asked the
question 'Does a dog have the Buddha nature?' and said 'Woof!' "
"I'd say that was a lot of
silly Zen Buddhism." This took Japhy
back a bit. "Lissen Japhy," I said, "I'm not a Zen Buddhist,
I'm a serious Buddhist, I'm an oldfashioned dreamy Hinayana coward of later Mahayanism," and so forth into the night, my contention being that Zen Buddhism
didn't concentrate on kindness so
much as on confusing the intellect to make it perceive the illusion of
all sources of things. "It's mean" I complained. "All
those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the
mud because they can't answer their silly word questions."
"That's
because they want them to realize mud is better than words,
boy." But I can't recreate the exact (will try) brilliance of all Japhy's answers and
come-backs and come-ons with which he had me on pins and needles all the rime
and did eventually stick something in my crystal head that made me change my plans in life.
Anyway I
followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night,
which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of
the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night.
And I was the one
who got things jumping by going around col-
14
lecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience
standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of
California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when
Alvah Goldbook was reading his, wailing his poem "Wail" drunk with
arms outspread everybody was yelling "Go! Go! Go!" (like a jam
session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was
wiping his tears in gladness. Japhy himself read his fine poems about Coyote
the God of the North American Plateau Indians (I think), at least the God of
the Northwest Indians, Kwakiutl and what-all. "Fuck you! sang Coyote, and
ran away!" read Japhy to the distinguished audience, making them all howl
with joy, it was so pure, fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean. And he
had his tender lyrical lines, like the ones about bears eating berries,
showing his love of animals, and great mystery lines about oxen on the
Mongolian road showing his knowledge of Oriental literature even on to Hsuan
Tsung the great Chinese monk who walked from China to Tibet, Lanchow to Kashgar
and Mongolia carrying a stick of incense in his hand. Then Japhy showed bis
sudden barroom humor with lines about Coyote bringing goodies. And bis anarchistic
ideas about how Americans don't know how to live, with lines about commuters
being trapped in living rooms that come from poor trees felled by chainsaws
(showing here, also, bis background as a logger up north). His voice was
deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of oldtime American heroes
and orators. Something earnest and strong and humanly hopeful I liked about
him, while the other poets were either too dainty in their aestheticism, or too
hysterically cynical to hope for anything, or too abstract and indoorsy, or too
political, or like Coughlin too incomprehensible to under-
15
stand (big Coughlin saying things about "unclarified
processes" though where Coughlin did say that revelation was a personal thing I noticed the strong Buddhist and
idealistic feeling of Japhy, which he'd shared with goodhearted
Coughlin in their buddy days at college, as I had shared mine with Alvah in the
Eastern scene and with others less apocalyptical and straighter but in no sense
more sympathetic and tearful).
Meanwhile scores of people stood
around in the darkened gallery straining to hear every word of the amazing
poetry reading as I wandered from group to group, facing them and facing away
from the stage, urging them to glug a slug from the jug, or wandered back and
sat on the right side of the stage giving out little wows and yesses of
approval and even whole sentences of comment with nobody's invitation but in
the general gaiety nobody's disapproval either. It was a great night. Delicate
Francis DaPavia read, from delicate onionskin, yellow pages, or pink, which he
kept flipping carefully with long white fingers, the poems of bis dead
chum Altman who'd eaten too much peyote in Chihuahua (or died of polio, one)
but read none of his own poems—a charming elegy in itself to the memory of the
dead young poet, enough to draw tears from the Cervantes of Chapter Seven, and
read them in a delicate Englishy voice that had me crying with inside laughter
though I later got to know Francis and liked him.
Among the people standing in the
audience was Rosie Bu-chanan, a girl with a
short haircut, red-haired, bony, handsome, a real gone chick and friend
of everybody of any consequence on the
Beach, who'd been a painter's model and a writer herself and was bubbling
over with excitement at that time because she was in love with my old buddy
Cody. "Great, hey Rosie?" I yelled, and she took a big slug from my
jug and shined eyes
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at me. Cody just stood behind her
with both arms around her waist. Between poets, Rheinhold Cacoethes, in
his bow tie and shabby old coat, would get up and make a little funny
speech in his snide funny voice and introduce the next reader; but as I say come eleven-thirty when all
the poems were read and everybody was
milling around wondering what had happened and what would come next in American poetry, he was wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. And we all got
together with him, the poets, and
drove in several cars to Chinatown for a big fabulous dinner off the Chinese menu, with chopsticks, yelling conversation
in the middle of the night in one of those free-swinging great Chinese restaurants of San Francisco. This happened
to be Japhy's favorite Chinese restaurant, Nam Yuen, and he showed me how to
order and how to eat with chopsticks and
told anecdotes about the Zen Lunatics of the Orient and had me going so glad (and we had a bottle of
wine on the table) that finally I went over to an old cook in the
doorway of the kitchen and asked him "Why did Bodhidharma come from the
West?" (Bodhidharma was the Indian who brought Buddhism eastward to China.)
"I
don't care," said the old cook, with lidded eyes, and I told Japhy and he said, "Perfect
answer, absolutely perfect. Now you know
what I mean by Zen."
I had a lot
more to learn, too. Especially about how to handle girls—Japhy's incomparable Zen
Lunatic way, which I got a chance to see
firsthand the following week.
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In Berkeley I was living with
Alvah Goldbook in his little rose-covered cottage in the backyard of a
bigger house on Milvia Street. The old
rotten porch slanted forward to the
ground, among vines, with a nice old rocking chair that I sat in every
morning to read my Diamond Sutra. The yard was
full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that
I loved to sit under and meditate on those cool perfect starry
California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world. We had a perfect
little kitchen with a gas stove, but no icebox, but no matter. We also had a
perfect little bathroom with a tub and hot
water, and one main room, covered with pillows and floor mats of straw
and mattresses to sleep on, and books, books, hundreds of books everything from
Catullus to Pound to Blyth to albums of Bach
and Beethoven (and even one swinging
Ella Fitzgerald album with Clark Terry very interesting on trumpet) and
a good three-speed Webcor phonograph that played
loud enough to blast the roof off: and the roof nothing but plywood, the walls too, through which one
night in one of our Zen Lunatic
drunks I put my fist in glee and Coughlin saw me and put his head through about three inches. About a mile from there, way down Milvia and then
upslope
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toward the campus of the University of
California, behind another big old house on a quiet street (Hillegass), Japhy
lived in his own shack which was infinitely smaller than ours, about twelve by
twelve, with nothing in it but typical Japhy appurtenances that showed his belief in the simple monastic life—no chairs
at all, not even one sentimental rocking chair, but just straw mats. In the corner was his famous rucksack
with cleaned-up pots and pans all fitting into one another in a compact
unit and all tied and put away inside a knotted-up blue bandana. Then his
Japanese wooden pata shoes, which he never used, and a pair of black
inside-pata socks to pad around softly in over his pretty straw mats, just room
for your four toes on one side and your big
toe on the other. He had a slew of orange crates all filled with
beautiful scholarly books, some of them in Oriental languages, all the great
sutras, comments on sutras, the complete works of D. T. Suzuki and a fine quadruple-volume
edition of Japanese haikus. He also had an immense collection of valuable
general poetry. In fact if a thief should have broken in there the only things
of real value were the books. Japhy's clothes were all old hand-me-downs bought
secondhand with a bemused and happy expression in Goodwill and Salvation Army stores: wool socks darned,
colored undershirts, jeans, workshirts, moccasin shoes, and a few
turtleneck sweaters that he wore one on top the other in the cold mountain
nights of the High Sierras in California and the High Cascades of Washington
and Oregon on the long incredible jaunts that sometimes lasted weeks and weeks
with just a few pounds of dried food in his pack. A few orange crates made his
table, on which, one late sunny afternoon
as I arrived, was steaming a peaceful cup of tea at his side as he bent
his serious head to the Chinese signs of the poet Han Shan. Coughlin had given
me
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the address and I came there, seeing first
Japhy's bicycle on the lawn in front of the big house out front (where his
landlady lived) then the few odd boulders and rocks and funny little trees he'd
brought back from mountain jaunts to set out in his own "Japanese tea
garden" or "tea-house garden," as there was a convenient pine
tree soughing over his little domicile.
A peacefuler scene I never saw than when, in
that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and
looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting crosslegged on a
Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and
scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain
cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said,
"Ray, come in," and bent his eyes again to the script.
"What
you doing?"
"Translating Han Shan's great poem called
'Cold Mountain' written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides
of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings."
"Wow."
"When
you come into this house though you've got to take your shoes off, see those straw
mats, you can ruin 'em with shoes." So I took my softsoled blue cloth
shoes off and laid them dutifully by the door and he threw me a pillow and I
sat crosslegged along the little wooden board wall and he offered me a cup of
hot tea. "Did you ever read the Book of Tea?" said he.
"No,
what's that?"
"It's
a scholarly treatise on how to make tea utilizing all the knowledge of two
thousand years about tea-brewing. Some of the descriptions of the effect of the
first sip of tea, and the second, and the third, are really wild and
ecstatic."
2ï
"Those
guys got high on nothing, hey?"
"Sip your tea and you'll
see; this is good green tea." It was good and I immediately felt calm and
warm. "Want me to read you parts of this Han Shan poem? Want me to tell
you about Han Shan?"
"Yeah."
"Han Shan you see was a
Chinese scholar who got sick of the big city and the world and took off to hide
in the mountains."
"Say,
that sounds like you."
"In those days you could
really do that. He stayed in caves not far from a Buddhist monastery in the
T'ang Hsing district of T'ien Tai and his only human friend was the funny Zen
Lunatic Shih-te who had a job sweeping
out the monastery with a straw broom. Shih-te was a poet too but he never wrote
much down. Every now and then Han Shan would come down from Cold Mountain in
his bark clothing and come into the warm kitchen and wait for food, but none of
the monks would ever feed him because he didn't want to join the order and
answer the meditation bell three times a day. You see why in some of his
utterances, like—listen and I'll look here and read from the Chinese," and
I bent over his shoulder and watched him
read from big wild crowtracks of Chinese signs: "Climbing up Cold
Mountain path, Cold Mountain path goes on and on, long gorge choked with scree
and boulders, wide creek and mist-blurred grass, moss is slippery though there's
been no rain, pine sings but there's no wind, who can leap the world's ties and
sit with me among white clouds?"
"Wow."
"Course that's my own translation into English, you
see
21
there are five signs for each line and I have to put in
Western prepositions and articles and
such."
"Why don't you just
translate it as it is, five signs, five words?
What's those first five signs?"
"Sign
for climbing, sign for up, sign for cold, sign for mountain, sign
for path."
"Well then, translate it 'Climbing up Cold Mountain
path.' "
"Yeah, but what do you do
with the sign for long, sign for gorge, sign for choke, sign for avalanche,
sign for boulders?"
"Where's
that?"
"That's
the third line, would have to read 'Long gorge choke avalanche
boulders.' "
"Well that's even better!"
"Well
yeah, I thought of that, but I have to have this pass the approval of
Chinese scholars here at the university and have it clear in English."
"Boy what a great thing this
is," I said looking around at the little shack, "and you sitting here
so very quietly at this very quiet hour studying all alone with your glasses. .
. ."
"Ray what you got to do is
go climb a mountain with me soon. How would you like to climb Matterhorn?"
"Great!
Where's that?"
"Up in the High Sierras. We
can go there with Henry Morley in his car
and bring our packs and take off from the lake. I could carry all the food and
stuff we need in my rucksack and you could borrow Alvah's small knapsack
and carry extra socks and shoes and
stuff."
"What's these signs mean?"
"These signs mean that Han
Shan came down from the mountain after many
years roaming around up there, to see his
22
folks in town, says, 'Till recently I stayed at Cold
Mountain, et cetera, yesterday I called on friends and family, more than half
had gone to the Yellow Springs,' that means death, the Yellow Springs, 'now
morning I face my lone shadow, I can't study
with both eyes full of tears.' "
"That's like you too, Japhy,
studying with eyes full of tears."
"My
eyes aren't full of tears!"
"Aren't
they going to be after a long long time?"
"They certainly will, Ray .
. . and look here, 'In the mountains it's
cold, it's always been cold not just this year,' see, he's real high,
maybe twelve thousand or thirteen thousand feet or more, way up there, and
says, 'Jagged scarps always snowed in, woods
in the dark ravines spitting mist, grass is still sprouting at the end of June, leaves begin to fall in
early August, and here am I high as a junkey—' "
"As
a junkey!"
"That's my own translation,
he actually says here am I as high as the sensualist in the city below, but I
made it modern and high translation."
"Great."
I wondered why Han Shan was Japhy's hero.
"Because,"
said he, "he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle
of meditation on the essence of all things, a vegetarian too by the way though
I haven't got on that kick from figuring maybe in this modern world to be a
vegetarian is to split hairs a little since all sentient beings eat what they
can. And he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely
and true to himself."
"That sounds like you too."
"And like you too, Ray, I
haven't forgotten what you told me about how you made it in the woods
meditating in North
23
Carolina and all." Japhy was very
sad, subdued, I'd never seen him so quiet, melancholy, thoughtful his voice was as tender as a mother's, he seemed to be talking from far
away to a poor yearning creature (me) who needed to hear his message he wasn't putting anything on he was in a bit of a
trance.
"Have
you been meditating today?"
"Yeah I meditate first thing
in the morning before breakfast and I
always meditate a long time in the afternoon unless I'm interrupted."
"Who
interrupts you?"
"Oh,
people. Coughlin sometimes, and Alvah came yesterday, and Rol Sturlason, and I got
this girl comes over to play yabyum."
"Yabyum? What's that?"
"Don't you know about
yabyum, Smith? I'll tell you later." He
seemed to be too sad to talk about yabyum, which I found out about a
couple of nights later. We talked a while longer about Han Shan and poems on cliffs and as I was going away his friend
Rol Sturlason, a tall blond goodlooking kid, came in to discuss his coming trip to Japan with him. This Rol Sturlason was interested in the famous Ryoanji rock
garden of Shokokuji monastery in Kyoto, which is nothing but old
boulders placed in such a way, supposedly mystically aesthetic, as to cause
thousands of tourists and monks every year to journey there to stare at the boulders in the sand and thereby gain peace of
mind. I have never met such weird yet serious and earnest people. I never saw
Rol Sturlason again, he went to Japan soon after, but I can't forget what he
said about the boulders, to my question, "Well who placed them in that
certain way that's so great?"
"Nobody knows, some monk, or monks, long ago. But
there
24
is a definite mysterious form in the arrangement of the
rocks. It's only through form that we can realize emptiness." He showed me
the picture of the boulders in well-raked sand, looking like islands in the
sea, looking as though they had eyes (declivities) and surrounded by a neatly
screened and architectural monastery patio. Then he showed me a diagram of the
stone arrangement with the projection in silhouette and showed me the
geometrical logics and all, and mentioned the phrases
"lonely individuality" and the rocks as "bumps pushing into
space," all meaning some kind of koan business I wasn't as much interested
in as in him and especially in good kind Japhy who brewed more tea on his noisy
gasoline primus and gave us added cups with almost a silent Oriental bow. It
was quite different from the night of the poetry reading.
But the next night, about midnight, Coughlin and I and
Alvah got together and decided to buy a big gallon jug of Burgundy and go bust
in on Japhy in his shack.
"What's
he doing tonight?" I asked.
"Oh," says Coughlin,
"probably studying, probably screwing,
we'll go see." We bought the jug on Shattuck Avenue way down and
went over and once more I saw his pitiful English
25
bicycle on the lawn. "Japhy travels around on that
bicycle with his little knapsack on his back all up and down Berkeley all
day," said Coughlin. "He used to do the same thing at Reed College in
Oregon. He was a regular fixture up there. Then we'd throw big wine parties and
have girls and end up jumping out of windows and playing Joe College pranks
all up and down town."
"Gee, he's strange,"
said Alvah, biting his lip, in a mood of marvel,
and Alvah himself was making a careful interested study of our strange
noisy-quiet friend. We came in the little door again, Japhy looked up from his crosslegged study over a book, American
poetry this time, glasses on, and said nothing but "Ah" in a
strangely cultured tone. We took off our shoes and padded across the little
five feet of straw to sit by him, but I was last with my shoes off, and had the
jug in my hand, which I turned to show him from across the shack, and from his
crosslegged position Japhy suddenly roared "Yaaaaah!" and leaped up
into the air and straight across the room to me, landing on his feet in a
fencing position with a sudden dagger in his hand the tip of it just barely
stabbing the glass of the bottle with a small distinct "clink." It
was the most amazing leap I ever saw in my life, except by nutty acrobats, much
like a mountain goat, which he was, it turned out. Also it reminded me of a
Japanese Samurai warrior—the yelling roar, the leap, the position, and his
expression of comic wrath his eyes bulging and making a big funny face at me. I
had the feeling it was really a complaint against our breaking in on his
studies and against wine itself which would get him drunk and make him miss his
planned evening of reading. But without further ado he uncapped the bottle
himself and took a
26
big slug and we all sat crosslegged and spent four hours
screaming news at one another, one of the funniest nights. Some of it went like this:
japhy: Well,
Coughlin, you old fart, what you been doin?
coughlin: Nothin.
alvah: What are all these strange books here? Hm,
Pound, do you like Pound?
japhy: Except for the fact that that old fartface
flubbed up the name
of Li Po by calling him by his Japanese name and all such famous twaddle, he
was all right—in fact he's my favorite poet.
ray: Pound? Who wants to make a favorite poet out of
that pretentious nut?
japhy: Have some more wine, Smith,
you're not making sense. Who is your favorite poet, Alvah?
ray: Why don't somebody ask me my favorite
poet, I know more about poetry than all of you put together.
japhy: Is that
true?
alvah: It might be. Haven't you seen Ray's new book
of poems he just wrote in Mexico—"the wheel of the quivering meat
conception turns in the void expelling tics, porcupines, elephants,
people, stardusts, fools, nonsense . . ."
ray: That's not
it!
japhy: Speaking of meat, have you read
the new poem of ...
Etc., etc.,
then finally disintegrating into a wild talkfest and yellfest
and finally songfest with people rolling on the floor in laughter and ending with Alvah
and Coughlin and I going staggering up the quiet college street arm in arm
singing "Eli Eli" at the top of our voices and dropping the empty jug right at our feet in a crash of glass, as
Japhy laughed from
27
his little door. But we'd made him miss his evening
of study and I felt bad about that, till the following night when he suddenly
appeared at our little cottage with a pretty girl and came in and told her to
take her clothes off, which she did at once.
This was in keeping with Japhy's
theories about women and lovemaking. I forgot to mention that the day the rock
artist had called on him in the late afternoon, a girl had come right after, a
blonde in rubber boots and a Tibetan coat with wooden buttons, and in the
general talk she'd inquired about our plan to climb Mount Matterhorn and said
"Can I come with ya?" as she was a bit of a mountainclimber herself.
"Shore," said Japhy, in
his funny voice he used for joking, a big loud deep imitation of a
lumberjack he knew in the Northwest, a ranger actually, old Burnie Byers,
"shore, come on with us and we'll all screw ya at ten thousand feet"
and the way he said it was so funny and casual, and in fact serious, that the
girl wasn't shocked at all but somewhat pleased. In this same spirit he'd now
brought this girl Princess to our cottage, it was about eight o'clock at night,
dark, Alvah and I were quietly sipping tea and reading poems or typing poems
28
at the
typewriter and two bicycles came in the yard: Japhy on his,
Princess on hers. Princess had gray eyes and yellow hair and was very
beautiful and only twenty. I must say one thing about her, she was sex mad and man
mad, so there wasn't much of a problem in persuading her to play yabyum. "Don't you know about yabyum, Smith?" said Japhy in his
big booming voice striding in in his boots holding Princess's hand.
"Princess and I come here to show ya,
boy."
"Suits
me," said I, "whatever it is." Also I'd known Princess before and had been mad about
her, in the City, about a year ago. It was just another wild coincidence that
she had happened to meet Japhy and fallen in love with him and madly too, she'd
do anything he said. Whenever people dropped in to visit us at the cottage I'd
always put my red bandana over the little
wall lamp and put out the ceiling light to make a nice cool red dim
scene to sit and drink wine and talk in. I
did this, and went to get the bottle out of the kitchen and couldn't
believe my eyes when I saw Japhy and Alvah taking their clothes off and
throwing them every whichaway and I looked
and Princess was stark naked, her skin white as snow when the red sun
hits it at dusk, in the dim red light. "What the hell," I said.
"Here's what yabyum is,
Smith," said Japhy, and he sat crosslegged
on the pillow on the floor and motioned to Princess, who came over and
sat down on him facing him with her arms about
his neck and they sat like that saying nothing for a while. Japhy wasn't
at all nervous and embarrassed and just sat there in perfect form just
as he was supposed to do. "This is what
they do in the temples of Tibet. It's a holy ceremony, it's done just like this in front of
chanting priests. Peo-
29
ple pray and recite Om Mani Pahdme Hum, which means Amen the Thunderbolt in the Dark Void. I'm the
thunderbolt and Princess is the dark void, you see."
"But what's she
thinking?" I yelled almost in despair, I'd had such idealistic longings for that girl in that past year and had
conscience-stricken hours wondering if I should seduce her because she was so young and all.
"Oh this is lovely," said Princess. "Come
on and try it."
"But I can't sit crosslegged
like that." Japhy was sitting in the full lotus position, it's called,
with both ankles over both thighs. Alvah was sitting on the mattress trying to
yank his ankles over his thighs to do it. Finally Japhy's legs began to hurt
and they just tumbled over on the mattress where both Alvah and Japhy began to explore the territory. I still couldn't believe it.
"Take your clothes off and
join in, Smith!" But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I'd
also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was
the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and
I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded
lust as offensive and even cruel.
"Pretty girls make
graves," was my saying, whenever I'd had to turn my head around
involuntarily to stare at the incomparable
pretties of Indian Mexico. And the absence of active lust in me had
also given me a new peaceful life that I was enjoying a great deal. But this
was too much. I was still afraid to take my clothes off; also I never liked to
do that in front of more than one person, especially with men around. But Japhy
didn't give a goddamn hoot and holler about any of this and pretty soon he was
making Princess happy and
úï
then Alvah had a turn (with his big
serious eyes staring in the dim light, and him reading poems a minute ago). So I said "How about me startin to work on her
arm?"
"Go ahead, great."
Which I did, lying down on the floor with
all my clothes on and kissing her hand, then her wrist, then up, to her body, as she laughed and almost cried
with delight everybody everywhere
working on her. All the peaceful celibacy of my Buddhism was going down
the drain. "Smith, I distrust any kind of Buddhism or any kinda
philosophy or social system that puts down
sex," said Japhy quite scholarly now that he was done and sitting
naked crosslegged rolling himself a Bull Durham cigarette (which he did as part
of his "simplicity" life). It ended up with everybody naked and finally making gay pots of coffee in the kitchen
and Princess on the kitchen floor naked with her knees clasped in her
arms, lying on her side, just for nothing, just to do it, then finally she and I took a warm bath together in the
bathtub and could hear Alvah and
Japhy discussing Zen Free Love Lunacy orgies in the other room.
"Hey Princess we'll do this
every Thursday night, hey?" yelled Japhy. "It'll be a regular
function."
"Yeah," yelled Princess
from the bathtub. I'm telling you she was actually glad to do all this and told
me "You know, I feel like I'm the
mother of all things and I have to take care of my little children."
"You're such a young pretty thing yourself."
"But I'm the old mother of
earth. I'm a Bodhisattva." She was just a little off her nut but when I
heard her say "Bodhisattva" I
realized she wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the
only way she could express it was this
31
way, which had its traditional roots
in the yabyum ceremony of Tibetan Buddhism, so everything was fine.
Alvah was immensely pleased and
was all for the idea of "every
Thursday night" and so was I by now.
"Alvah, Princess says she's a Bodhisattva."
"Of course she is."
"She
says she's the mother of all of us."
"The Bodhisattva women of Tibet
and parts of ancient India," said Japhy, "were taken and used as
holy concubines in temples
and sometimes in ritual caves and would get to lay up a stock of merit and they
meditated too. All of them, men and women,
they'd meditate, fast, have balls like this, go back to eating,
drinking, talking, hike around, live in viharas in the rainy season and
outdoors in the dry, there was no question of what to do about sex which is
what I always liked about Oriental religion. And what I always dug about the
Indians in our country . . . You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn't feel that I was an
American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and
general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and
when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a
previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in
that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and
my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.
That's why I was always sympathetic
to freedom movements, too, like anarchism in the Northwest, the oldtime
heroes of Everett Massacre and all. . . ." It ended up with long earnest
discussions about all these subjects and finally Princess got dressed and went
32
home with Japhy on their bicycles and
Alvah and I sat facing each other in the dim red light.
"But
you know, Ray, Japhy is really sharp—he's really the wildest craziest sharpest
cat we've ever met. And what I love about him is he's the big hero of the
West Coast, do you realize I've been out here for two years now and
hadn't met anybody worth
knowing really or anybody with any truly illuminated intelligence and was giving up hope for the West Coast? Besides all the background he has, in Oriental
scholarship, Pound, taking peyote and seeing visions, his
mountainclimbing and bhikkuing, wow, Japhy
Ryder is a great new hero of American culture."
"He's mad!" I agreed.
"And other things I like about him, his
quiet sad moments when he don't say much. . . ."
"Gee,
I wonder what will happen to him in the end."
"I think he'll end up like
Han Shan living alone in the mountains and
writing poems on the walls of cliffs, or chanting them to crowds
outside his cave."
"Or maybe he'll go to
Hollywood and be a movie star, you know he said that the other day, he said
'Alvah you know I've never thought of going to the movies and becoming a star,
I can do anything you know, I haven't tried that yet,' and I believe him, he can
do anything. Did you see the way he had
Princess all wrapped around Mm?"
"Aye indeed" and later
that night as Alvah slept I sat under the
tree in the yard and looked up at the stars or closed my eyes to
meditate and tried to quiet myself down back to my normal self.
Alvah
couldn't sleep and came out and lay flat on his back in the
grass looking up at the sky, and said "Big steamy clouds
33
going by in the dark up there, it makes me realize we
live on an actual planet."
"Close
your eyes and you'll see more than that."
"Oh I
don't know what you mean by all that!" he said pettishly. He was always being
bugged by my little lectures on Samadhi
ecstasy, which is the state you reach when you stop everything and stop
your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal
multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful
images and forms of objects, which are, after all, imaginary. And if you don't
believe me come back in a billion years and deny it. For what is time? "Don't you think it's much more interesting
just to be like Japhy and have girls and studies and good times and really be doing something, than all
this silly sitting under trees?"
"Nope,"
I said, and meant it, and I knew Japhy would agree with me.
"All Japhy's doing is amusing himself in the void."
"I
don't think so."
"I bet he is. I'm going mountainclimbing
with him next week and find out and tell
you."
"Well" (sigh), "as
for me, I'm just going to go on being Alvah Goldbook and to hell with all this
Buddhist bullshit."
"You'll be sorry some day. Why
don't you ever understand what I'm trying to tell you: it's with your
six senses that you're fooled into believing not only that you have six senses, but that
you contact an actual outside world with them. If it wasn't for your eyes, you wouldn't see me. If it wasn't for your ears, you wouldn't hear that airplane.
If it wasn't for your nose, you wouldn't smell the midnight mint. If it wasn't for your tongue taster, you wouldn't taste
the difference be-
34
tween A and B. If it wasn't for your body, you wouldn't
feel Princess. There is no me, no airplane, no mind, no Princess, no nothing,
you for krissakes do you want to go on being fooled
every damn minute of your life?"
"Yes,
that's all I want, I thank God that something has come out of
nothing."
"Well, I got news for you,
it's the other way around nothing has come out of something, and that
something is Dhar-makaya, the body of the True Meaning, and that nothing is
this and all this twaddle and talk. I'm going to bed."
"Well
sometimes I see a flash of illumination in what you're trying to say but believe me I
get more of a satori out of Princess than
out of words."
"It's
a satori of your foolish flesh, you lecher."
"I know my redeemer liveth."
"What
redeemer and what liveth?"
"Oh let's cut this out and just live!"
"Balls,
when I thought like you, Alvah, I was just as miserable and graspy as you are now.
All you want to do is run out there and get
laid and get beat up and get screwed up and get old and sick and banged
around by samsara, you fucking eternal meat of comeback you you'll deserve it
too, I'll say."
"That's not nice.
Everybody's tearful and trying to live with
what they got. Your Buddhism has made you mean Ray and makes you even afraid to take your clothes off
for a simple healthy orgy."
"Well,
I did finally, didn't I?"
"But
you were coming on so ninety about— Oh let's forget it."
Alvah went
to bed and I sat and closed my eyes and thought "This thinking has stopped" but because I
had to think it no
35
thinking had stopped, but there did come over me a wave of
gladness to know that all this perturbation was just a dream already ended and I didn't have to worry because
I wasn't "I" and I prayed that God, or Tathagata, would give
me enough time and enough sense and strength to be able to tell people what I
knew (as I can't even do properly now) so they'd know what I know and not
despair so much. The old tree brooded over
me silently, a living thing. I heard a mouse snoring in the garden
weeds. The rooftops of Berkeley looked like
pitiful living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the eternality of
the heavens which they feared to face. By the time I went to bed I wasn't taken
in by no Princess or no desire for no Princess and nobody's disapproval and I
felt glad and slept well.
Now came the time for our big
mountain climb. Japhy came over in late afternoon on his bike to get me.
We took out Alvah's knapsack and put it in his bike basket. I took out socks and sweaters. But I had no climbing
shoes and the only things that could
serve were Japhy's tennis sneakers, old but firm. My own shoes were too
floppy and torn. "That might be better, Ray, with sneakers your feet are
light and you can jump from boulder to boulder with no trouble. Of course we'll
swap shoes at certain times and make it."
36
"What about food? What are you bringing?" "Well before I tell you about food,
R-a-a-y" (sometimes he called me by my first name and always when
he did so, it was a long-drawn-out sad
"R-a-a-a-y" as though he was worried about my welfare),
"I've got your sleeping bag, it's not a duck down like my own, and
naturally a lot heavier, but with clothes on and a good big fire you'll be
comfortable up there."
"Clothes
on yeah, but why a big fire, it's only October." "Yeah but it's below freezing up there, R-a-a-y, in October," he said sadly. "At night?"
"Yeah at night and in the
daytime it's real warm and pleasant. You know old John Muir used to go up to
those mountains where we're going with
nothing but his old Army coat and a paper bag full of dried bread and he
slept in his coat and just soaked the old bread in water when he wanted to eat,
and he roamed around like that for months before tramping back to the
city."
"My goodness he musta been tough!"
"Now as for food, I went down to Market Street to the
Crystal Palace market and bought my favorite dry cereal, bulgur, which is a
kind of a Bulgarian cracked rough wheat and I'm going to stick pieces of bacon
in it, little square chunks, that'll make a fine supper for all three of us,
Morley and us. And I'm bringing tea, you
always want a good cup of hot tea under those cold stars. And I'm
bringing real chocolate pudding, not that
instant phony stuff but good chocolate pudding that I'll bring to a boil and
stir over the fire and then let it
cool ice cold in the snow." "Oh boy!"
37
"So insteada rice this time,
which I usually bring, 1 thought I'd make a nice delicacy for you, R-a-a-y, and
in the bulgur too I'm going to throw in all kinds of dried diced vegetables I
bought at the Ski Shop. We'll have our supper and breakfast outa this, and for
energy food this big bag of peanuts and raisins and another bag with dried
apricot and dried prunes oughta fix us for the rest." And he showed me the
very tiny bag in which all this important food for three grown men for
twenty-four hours or more climbing at high altitudes was stored. "The main
thing in going to mountains is to keep the weight as far down as possible,
those packs get heavy."
"But
my God there's not enough food in that little bag!"
"Yes
there is, the water swells it up."
"Do
we bring wine?"
"No it isn't any good up
there and once you're at high altitude and tired you don't crave alcohol."
I didn't believe this but said nothing. We put my own things on the bike and
walked across the campus to his place pushing the bike along the edge of the
sidewalk. It was a cool clear Arabian Night dusk with the tower clock of
University of Cal a clean black shadow against a backdrop of cypress and
eucalyptus and all kinds of trees, bells ringing somewhere, and the air crisp.
"It's going to be cold up there," said Japhy, but he was feeling
fine that night and laughed when I asked him about next Thursday with Princess.
"You know we played yabyum twice more since that last night, she comes
over to my shack any day or night any minute and man she won't take no for an answer. So I satisfy the
Bodhisattva." And Japhy wanted to talk about everything, his boyhood
in Oregon. "You know my mother and father and sister were living a real
primitive
38
life on that logcabin farm and on cold winter mornings we'd
all undress and dress in front of the fire,
we had to, that's why I'm not like you about undressing, I mean I'm not
bashful or anything like that."
"What'd
you use to do around college?"
"In the
summers I was always a government fire lookout— that's what you oughta do next summer, Smith—and in the
winters I did a lot of skiing and used to walk .around the campus on crutches
real proud. I climbed some pretty big mountains up there, including a long haul
up Rainier almost to the top where you sign your name. I finally made it one
year. There are only a few names up there, you know. And I climbed all around the Cascades, off season and in
season, and worked as a logger. Smith, I gotta tell you all about the
romance of Northwest logging, like you keep talking about railroading, you shoulda seen the little
narrow-gauge railways up there and
those cold winter mornings with snow and your belly fulla pancakes and
syrup and black coffee, boy, and you raise your doublebitted ax to your
morning's first log there's nothing like it."
"That's just like my dream
of the Great Northwest. The Kwakiutl Indians, the Northwest Mounted Police. . .
."
"Well, there in Canada they
got them, over in British Columbia, I used
to meet some on the trail." We pushed the bike down past the
various college hangouts and cafeterias and looked into Robbie's to see if we
knew anybody. Alvah was in there, working his part-time job as busboy. Japhy
and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact
Japhy was considered an eccentric around the
campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to
think whenever a real man appears on the scene
39
—colleges being nothing but grooming
schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on
the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and
television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing
and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go
prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find
the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious
secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. "All these people,"
said Japhy, "they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty
craps like bears in the mountains, but it's
all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of
crap any more or realizes that their origin
is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their
hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom." He had a
million ideas, he had 'em all.
We got to his little shack as it
grew dark and you could smell woodsmoke and
smoke of leaves in the air, and packed everything up neat and went down
the street to meet Henry Morley who had the car. Henry Morley was a bespectacled
fellow of great learning but an eccentric himself, more eccentric and outre than Japhy on the campus, a librarian,
with few friends, but a mountainclimber. His own little one-room cottage in a back lawn of Berkeley was filled with
books and pictures of mountainclimbing and scattered all
over with rucksacks, climbing boots, skis. I was amazed to hear him talk, he
talked exactly like Rheinhold Cacoethes the
critic, it turned out they'd been friends long ago and climbed mountains
together and I couldn't tell whether Morley had influenced Cacoethes or the
other way around.
40
I felt it was Morley who had done the influencing—he had
the same snide, sarcastic, extremely witty, well-formulated speech, with
thousands of images, like, when Japhy and I walked in and there was a gathering
of Morley's friends in there (a strange outlandish group including one Chinese
and one German from Germany and several
other students of some kind) Morley said "I'm bringing my air
mattress, you guys can sleep on that hard cold ground if you want but I'm going
to have pneumatic aid besides I went and spend sixteen dollars on it in the
wilderness of Oakland Army Navy stores and drove around all day wondering if
with rollerskates or suction cups you can technically call yourself a
vehicle" or some such to-me-incomprehensible (to everybody else)
secret-meaning joke of his own, to which nobody listened much anyway, he kept talking and talking as
though to himself but I liked him right away. We sighed when we saw the
huge amounts of junk he wanted to take on the climb: even canned goods, and
besides his rubber air mattress a whole lot
of pickax and whatnot equipment we'd really never need.
"You can carry that ax,
Morley, but I don't think we'll need it, but canned goods is just a lot of
water you have to hig on your back, don't you realize we got all the water we want waitin for us up there?"
"Well I just thought a can
of this Chinese chop suey would be kinda tasty."
"I've
got enough food for all of us. Let's go."
Morley spent a long time talking
and fishing around and getting together his unwieldy packboard and finally we
said goodbye to his friends and got into
Morley's little English car and started off, about ten o'clock, toward
Tracy and up to
41
Bridgeport
from where we would drive another eight miles to
the foot of the trail at the lake.
I sat in the back seat and they talked up front. Morley was
an actual madman who would come and get me
(later) carrying a quart of eggnog expecting me to drink that, but I'd
make him drive me to a liquor store, and the whole idea was to go out and see
some girl and he'd have me come along to act as pacifier of some kind: we came
to her door, she Opened it, when she saw who it was she slammed the door and we
drove back to the cottage. "Well what was this?" "Well it's a
long story," Morley would say vaguely, I never quite understood what he
was up to. Also, seeing Alvah had no spring
bed in the cottage, one day he appeared like a ghost in a doorway as we were innocently
getting up and brewing coffee and presented us with a huge double-bed spring
that, after he left, we struggled to hide
in the barn. And he'd bring odd assorted
boards and whatnot, and impossible bookshelves, all kinds of things, and years later I had further
Three Stooges adventures with him going out to his house in Contra Costa
(which he owned and rented) and spending impossible-to-believe afternoons when
he paid me two dollars an hour for hauling out bucket after bucket of mudslime
which he himself was doling out of a flooded cellar by hand, black and
mudcovered as Tartarilouak the King of the Mudslimes of Paratioalaouakak Span, with a secret grin of elfish delight on his
face; and later, returning through some little town and Wanting ice-cream cones, we walked down Main Street (had hiked on the highway with buckets and rakes) with
ice-cream cones in our hands knocking into people on the little sidewalks
like a couple of oldtime Hollywood silent film comedians, whitewash and all.
An extremely strange person any-
42
way, in any case, any old way you looked at, and drove the
car now out toward Tracy on the busy fourlaner highway and did most of the
talking, at everything Japhy said he had twelve to say, and it went like this:
Japhy would say something like "By God I feel real studious lately, I
think I'll read some ornithology next week." Morley would say, "Who
doesn't feel studious when he doesn't have a girl with a Riviera suntan?"
Every time he said something he
would turn and look at Japhy and deliver
these rather brilliant inanities with a complete deadpan; I couldn't
understand what kind of strange secret scholarly linguistic clown he really was
under these California skies. Or Japhy would mention sleeping bags, and Morley
would ramble in with "I'm going to be the possessor of a pale blue French
sleeping bag, light weight, goose down, good buy I think, find 'em in
Vancouver—good for Daisy Mae. Completely wrong type for Canada. Everyone wants
to know if her grandfather was an explorer who met an Eskimo. I'm from the
North Pole myself."
"What's he talking
about?" I'd ask from the back seat, and Japhy: "He's just an
interesting tape recorder."
I'd told the boys I had a touch
of thrombophlebitis, blood clots in the veins in my feet, and was afraid about
tomorrow's climb, not that it would hobble me but would get worse when we came
down. Morley said "Is thrombophlebitis a peculiar rhythm for piss?"
Or I'd say something about Westerners and he'd say, "I'm a dumb Westerner
. . . look what preconceptions have done to England."
"You're
crazy, Morley."
"I dunno, maybe I am, but if
I am I'll leave a lovely will anyway." Then out of nowhere he would say
"Well I'm very
43
pleased to go climbing with two poets, I'm going to write a
book myself, it'll be about Ragusa, a late medieval maritime city state
republic which solved the class problem, offered the secretaryship to
Machiavelli and for a generation had its language used as the diplomatic one
for the Levant. This was because of pull with the Turks, of course."
"Of course," we'd say.
So he'd ask
himself the question out loud: "Can you secure Christmas with an approximation
only eighteen million seconds left of the original old red chimney?"
"Sure," says Japhy laughing.
"Sure," says Morley
wheeling the car around increasing curves, "they're boarding reindeer
Greyhound specials for a pre-season
heart-to-heart Happiness Conference deep in Sierra wilderness ten thousand
five hundred and sixty yards from a primitive
motel. It's newer than analysis and deceptively simple. If you lost the roundtrip ticket you can
become a gnome, the outfits are cute and there's a rumor that Actors
Equity conventions sop up the overflow bounced from the Legion. Either way, of
course, Smith" (turning to me in the back) "and in finding your way
back to the emotional wilderness you're bound to get a present from . . .
someone. Will some maple syrup help you feel better?"
"Sure, Henry."
And that was Morley. Meanwhile
the car began climbing into the foothills somewhere and we came to sundry
sullen towns where we stopped for gas and nothing but bluejeaned Elvis Presleys
in the road, waiting to beat somebody up, but down beyond them the roar of fresh
creeks and the feel of the high mountains not far away. A pure sweet night, and
finally we got out on a real narrow tar country road and
44
headed
up toward the mountains for sure. Tall pine trees began to appear at the side
of the road and occasional rock cliffs. The air felt nippy and grand. This also
happened to be the opening eve of the hunting season and in a bar where we
stopped for a drink there were many hunters in red caps and wool shirts looking silly getting loaded, with all their guns and shells in their cars and eagerly asking us if
we'd seen any deer or not. We had, certainly, seen a deer, just before
we came to the bar. Morley had been driving
and talking, saying, "Well Ryder maybe you'll be Alfred Lord
Tennyson of our little tennis party here on the Coast, they'll call you the New
Bohemian and compare you to the Knights of the Round Table minus Amadis the
Great and the extraordinary splendors of the little Moorish kingdom that was
sold round to Ethiopia for seventeen
thousand camels and sixteen hundred foot
soldiers when Caesar was sucking on his mammy's teat," and suddenly
the deer was in the road, looking at our headlamps,
petrified, before leaping into the shrubbery by the side of the road and
disappearing into the sudden vast diamond silence of the forest (which we heard as Morley cut the motor) and
just the scuffle of its hoofs running off to the haven of the raw fish Indian
up there in the mists. It was real country we were in, Morley said about three
thousand feet now. We could hear creeks rushing coldly below on cold starlit
rocks without seeing them. "Hey little deer," I'd yelled to the animal, "don't worry, we won't
shoot you." Now in the bar,
where we'd stopped at my insistence ("In this kinda cold northern
upmountain country ain't nothin better for a man's
soul at midnight but a good warm glass of warmin red port heavy as the syrups of Sir Arthur")—
45
"Okay Smith," said
Japhy, "but seems to me we shouldn't drink on a hiking trip."
"Ah who gives a damn?"
"Okay,
but look at all the money we saved by buying cheap dried foods
for this weekend and all you're gonna do is drink it right down."
"That's the story of my life
rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor." We went in the bar, which
was a roadhouse ill done up in the upcountry mountain style, like a Swiss
chalet, with moose heads and designs of deer on the booths and the people in the bar itself an advertisement
for the hunting season but all of
them loaded, a weaving mass of shadows at the dim bar as we walked in
and sat at three stools and ordered the port. The port was a strange request in
the whisky country of hunters but the bartender rousted up an odd bottle of Christian Brothers port and poured us
two shots in wide wineglasses
(Morley a teetotaler actually) and Japhy and I drank and felt it fine.
"Ah," said Japhy warming up to his
wine and midnight, "soon I'm going
back north to visit my childhood wet woods and cloudy mountains and old
bitter intellectual friends and old drunken logger friends, by God, Ray you
ain't lived till you been up there with me,
or without. And then I'm going to
Japan and walk all over that hilly country finding ancient little temples hidden and forgotten in the
mountains and old Sages a hundred and nine years old praying to Kwannon
in huts and meditating so much that when they come out of meditation they laugh at everything that moves.
But that don't mean I don't love America, by God, though I hate these damn hunters, all they wanta do is level a gun at a
helpless sentient
46
being and murder it, for every sentient being or living
creature these actual pricks kill they will be reborn a thousand times to suffer the horrors of samsara and damn
good for 'em too."
"Hear
that, Morley, Henry, what you think?"
"My Buddhism is nothing but
a mild unhappy interest in some of the
pictures they've drawn though I must say sometimes Cacoethes strikes a
nutty note of Buddhism in his mountainclimbing poems though I'm not much
interested in the belief part of it." In fact it didn't make a goddamn
much of a difference to him. "I'm neutral," said he, laughing happily
with a kind of an eager slaking leer, and Japhy yelled:
"Neutral is what Buddhism is!"
"Well,
that port'll make you have to swear off yogurt. You know I am a fortiori disappointed
because there's no Benedictine or Trappist
wine, only Christian Brothers holy waters and spirits around here. Not
that I feel very expansive about being here
in this curious bar anyway, it looks like the home-plate for Ciardi and
Bread Loaf writers, Armenian grocers all of 'em, well-meaning awkward
Protestants who are on a group excursion
for a binge and want to but don't understand how to insert the
contraception. These people must be assholes," he added in a sudden
straight revelation. "The milk around here must be fine but more cows than
people. This must be a different race of
Anglos up here, I don't particularly warm
up to their appearance. The fast kids around here must go thirty-four
miles. Well, Japhy," said he, concluding, "if you ever get an official job I hope you get a Brooks Brothers suit
. . . hope you don't wind up in artsfartsy parties where it would— Say," as some girls walked in,
"young hunters . . . must be why the baby wards are open all
year."
47
But the hunters didn't like us to
be huddled there talking close and friendly in low voices about sundry personal
topics and joined us and pretty soon it was a long funny harangue up and down the oval bar about deer in
the locality, where to go climb, what do do, and when they heard we were
out in this country not to kill animals but just to climb mountains they took
us to be hopeless eccentrics and left as alone. Japhy and I had two wines and
felt fine and went back in the car with Morley and we drove away, higher and
higher, the trees taller, the air colder, climbing, till finally it was almost
two o'clock in the morning and they said we had a long way to go yet to
Bridgeport and the foot of the trail so we
might as well sleep out in these woods in our sleeping bags and call it a day.
"We'll get
up at dawn and take off. Meanwhile we have this good brown bread and cheese too," said Japhy producing
it, brown bread and cheese he'd thrown in at the last minute in his little
shack, "and that'll make a fine breakfast and we'll save the bulgur and goodies for our breakfast
tomorrow morning at ten thousand feet." Fine. Still talking and
all, Morley drove the car a little way over some hard pine needles under an
immense spread of natural park trees, firs and ponde-rosas a hundred feet high
some of them, a great quiet starlit grove with frost on the ground and dead
silence except for occasional little ticks
of sound in the thickets where maybe a rabbit stood petrified hearing
us. I got out my sleeping bag and spread it out and took off my shoes and just
as I was sighing happily and slipping my stockinged feet into my sleeping bag
and looking around gladly at the beautiful tall trees thinking "Ah what a
night of true sweet sleep this will be, what
meditations I can get into in this intense silence
48
of Nowhere" Japhy yelled at me from the car:
"Say, it appears Mr. Morley has forgotten his sleeping bag!"
"What
. . . well now what?"
They discussed it awhile fiddling
with flashlights in the frost and then Japhy came over and said "You'll
have to crawl outa there Smith, all we have is two sleeping bags now and gotta
zip 'em open and spread 'em out to form a blanket for three, goddammit that'll
be cold."
"What?
And the cold'll slip in around the bottoms!"
"Well Henry can't sleep in
that car, he'll freeze to death, no heater."
"But goddammit I was all
ready to enjoy this so much," I whined getting out and putting on my shoes
and pretty soon Japhy had fixed the two sleeping bags on top of ponchos and was
already settled down to sleep and on toss it was me had to sleep in the middle,
and it was way below freezing by now, and the stars were icicles of mockery. I
got in and lay down and Morley, I could hear the maniac blowing up his
ridiculous air mattress so he could lay beside me, but the moment he'd done so,
he started at once to turn over and heave and sigh, and around the other side,
and back toward me, and around the other side, all under the ice-cold stars and loveliness, while Japhy snored, Japhy
who wasn't subjected to all the mad wiggling. Finally Morley couldn't
sleep at all and got up and went to the car probably to talk to himself in
that mad way of his and I got a wink of sleep, but in a few minutes he was back, freezing, and got under the sleeping-bag blanket but started to turn and turn again,
even curse once in a while, or sigh, and this went on for what seemed to
be eternities and the first thing I knew Aurora was paling the eastern hems of
Amida and pretty soon we'd be getting up
49
anyway. That mad Morley! And this was only the beginning of
the misadventures of that most remarkable man (as you'll see now), that
remarkable man who was probably the only mountainclimber in the history of the
world who forgot to bring his sleeping bag. "Jesus," I thought,
"why didn't he just forget his dreary
air mattress instead."
From the very first moment we'd
"met Morley he'd kept emitting sudden yodels in keeping with our venture.
TMs was a simple "Yodelayhee" but it came at the oddest moments and
in oddest circumstances, like several times when his CMnese and German friends
were still around, then later in the car, sitting with us enclosed,
"Yodelayhee!" and then as we got out of the car to go in the bar,
"Yodelayhee!" Now as Japhy woke up and saw it was dawn and jumped out
of the bags and ran to gather firewood and shudder over a little preliminary
fire, Morley woke up from his nervous small sleep of dawn, yawned, and yelled
"Yodelayhee!" which echoed toward vales in the distance. I got up
too; it Was all we could do to hold together; the only thing to do was hop
around and flap your arms, like me and my sad bum on the gon on the south
coast. But soon Japhy got more logs on the fire and it was a roaring bonfire
that we turned our backs to after a while and yelled and talked. A
5ï
beautiful morning—red pristine shafts of sunlight coming in
over the hill and slanting down into the cold trees like cathedral light, and
the mists rising to meet the sun, and all the way around the giant secret roar
of tumbling creeks probably with films of ice in the pools. Great fishing country.
Pretty soon I was yelling "Yodelayhee" myself but when Japhy went to
fetch more wood and we couldn't see him for a while and Morley yelled
"Yodelayhee" Japhy answered back with a simple "Hoo" which
he said was the Indian way to call in the mountains and much nicer. So I began
to yell "Hoo" myself.
Then we got in the car and
started off. We ate the bread and cheese. No difference between the Morley of
this morning and the Morley of last night, except his voice as he rattled on
yakking in that cultured snide funny way of his was sorta cute with that
morning freshness, like the way people's voices sound after getting up early in
the morning, something faintly wistful and hoarse and eager in it, ready for a
new day. Soon the sun was warm. The black bread was good, it had been baked by
Sean Monahan's wife, Sean who had a shack in Corte Madera we could all go live
in free of rent some day. The cheese was sharp Cheddar. But it didn't satisfy
me much and when we got out into country with no more houses and anything I
began to yearn for a good old hot breakfast and suddenly after we'd gone over a
little creek bridge we saw a merry little lodge by the side of the road under
tremendous juniper trees with smoke boiling out of the chimney and neon signs
outside and a sign in the window advertising pancakes and hot coffee.
"Let's go in there, by God
we need a man's breakfast if we're gonna climb all day."
51
Nobody complained about my idea
and we went in, and sat at booths, and a nice woman took our orders with that
cheery loquaciousness of people in the backcountry. "Well you boys goin huntin this mornin?"
"No'm,"
said Japhy, "just climbing Matterhorn."
"Matterhorn, why I wouldn't do that if
somebody paid me a thousand dollars!"
Meanwhile I went out to the log
Johns out back and washed from water in the tap which was delightfully cold and
made my face tingle, then I drank some of it and it was like cool liquid ice in
my stomach and sat there real nice, and I had more. Shaggy dogs were barking in
the golden red sunlight slanting down from the hundred-foot branches of the
firs and ponderosas. I could see snowcapped mountains glittering in the
distance. One of them was Matterhorn. I went in and the pancakes were ready,
hot and steaming, and poured syrup over my three pats of butter and cut them up
and slurped hot coffee and ate. So did Henry
and Japhy—for once no conversation. Then we washed it all down with
that incomparable cold water as hunters came in in hunting boots with wool
shirts but no giddy drunk hunters but serious hunters ready to go out there
after breakfast. There was a bar adjoining but nobody cared about alcohol this morning.
We got in the car, crossed
another creek bridge, crossed a meadow with a few cows and log cabins, and came
out on a plain which clearly showed Matterhorn rising the highest most awful
looking of the jagged peaks to the south. "There she is," said Morley
really proud. "Isn't it beautiful, doesn't it remind you of the Alps? I've
got a collection of snow covered mountain
photos you should see sometime."
"I
like the real thing meself," said Japhy, looking seriously
52
at the
mountains and in that far-off look in his eyes, that secret self-sigh, I saw
he was back home again. Bridgeport is a little sleepy town, curiously New
England-like, on that plain. Two restaurants, two gas stations, a school, all
sidewalking Highway 395 as it comes through there running from down Bishop way up to Carson City Nevada.
Now another incredible delay was caused as Mr. Morley
decided to see if he could find a store open in Bridgeport and buy a sleeping
bag or at least a canvas cover or tarpaulin of some kind for tonight's sleep
at nine thousand feet and judging from last night's sleep at four thousand it
was bound to be pretty cold. Meanwhile Japhy and I waited, sitting in the now
hot sun of ten a.m. on the grass of the school, watching occasional laconic
traffic pass by on the not-busy highway and watching to see the fortunes of a
young Indian hitchhiker pointed north. We discussed him warmly. "That's
what I like, hitchhiking around, feeling free, imagine though being an Indian
and doing all that. Dammit Smith, let's go talk to him and wish him luck."
The Indian wasn't very talkative but not unfriendly and told us he'd been
making pretty slow time on 395. We wished him luck. Meanwhile in the very tiny
town Morley was nowhere to be seen.
53
"What's he doing, waking up some proprietor in his bed
back there?"
Finally Morley came back and said
there was nothing available and the only thing to do was to borrow a couple of
blankets at the lake lodge. We got in the
car, went back down the highway a few hundred yards, and turned south toward
the glittering trackless snows high in the
blue air. We drove along beautiful
Twin Lakes and came to the lake lodge, which was a big white framehouse
inn, Morley went in and deposited five dollars for the use of two blankets for
one night. A woman was standing in the
doorway arms akimbo, dogs barked. The road was dusty, a dirt road, but
the lake was cerulean pure. In it the reflections of the cliffs and foothills
showed perfectly. But the road was being repaired and we could see yellow dust
boiling up ahead where we'd have to walk
along the lake road awhile before cutting across a creek at the end of
the lake and up through underbrush and up the beginning
of the trail.
We parked the car and got all our gear out and arranged it in the warm sun. Japhy put things in my knapsack
and told me I had to carry it or jump in the lake. He was being very serious and leaderly and it pleased me more than anything
else. Then with the same boyish gravity he went over to the dust of the road with the pickax and drew a big circle and
began drawing things in the circle.
"What's
that?"
"I'm doin a magic mandala that'll not only help us on
our climb but after a few more marks and chants I'll be able to predict the future from it."
"What's a mandala?"
54
"They're the Buddhist designs that are always circles filled with things, the circle representing
the void and the things illusion, see. You sometimes see mandalas painted over
a Bodhisattva's head and can tell his history from studying it. Tibetan in
origin."
I had
on the tennis sneakers and now I whipped out my mountainclimbing' cap for the
day, which Japhy
had consigned to me, which was
a little black French beret, which I put on at a jaunty angle and hitched the
knapsack up and I was ready to go. In the sneakers and the beret I felt more
like a Bohemian painter than a mountainclimber. But Japhy had on his fine big boots and his little green Swiss cap
with feather, and looked elfin but rugged. I see the picture of him
alone in the mountains in that outfit: the vision: it's pure morning in the
high dry Sierras, far off clean firs can be seen shadowing the sides of rocky
hills, further yet snowcapped pinpoints, nearer the big bushy forms of pines
and there's Japhy in his little cap with a big rucksack on his back, clomping
along, but with a flower in his left hand which is hooked to the strap of the
rucksack at his breast; grass grows
out between crowded rocks and boulders; distant sweeps of scree can be
seen making gashes down the sides of morning, his eyes shine with joy, he's on
his way, his heroes are John Muir and Han Shan and Shih-te and Li Po and John
Burroughs and Paul Bunyan and Kropotkin; he's small and has a funny kind of
belly coming out as he strides, but it's not because his belly is big, it's
because his spine curves a bit, but that's offset by the vigorous long steps he
takes, actually the long steps of a tall man (as I found out following him
uptrail) and his chest is deep and shoulders
broad. "Goldangit Japhy I feel great this morning," I said as
we
55
locked
the car and all three of us started swinging down the lake road with our packs,
straggling a bit occupying side and center and other side of the road like
straggling infantrymen. "Isn't this a hell of a lot greater than The
Place? Gettin drunk in there on a fresh Saturday morning like this, all bleary
and sick, and here we are by the fresh pure lake walkin along in this good air,
by God it's a haiku in itself."
"Comparisons are odious, Smith," he sent sailing
back to me, quoting Cervantes and making a Zen Buddhist observation to
boot. "It don't make a damn frigging difference whether you're in The
Place or hiking up Matterhorn, it's all the same old void, boy." And I
mused about that and realized he was right, comparisons are odious, it's
all the same, but it sure felt great and suddenly I realized this (in spite of
my swollen foot veins) would do me a lot of good and get me away from drinking
and maybe make me appreciate perhaps a
whole new way of living.
"Japhy I'm glad I met you. I'm gonna learn all about
how to pack rucksacks and what to do and hide in these mountains when I'm sick
of civilization. In fact I'm grateful I met you."
"Well Smith I'm grateful I met you too, learnin about
how to write spontaneously and all
that."
"Ah
that's nothing."
"To me it's a lot. Let's go boys, a little faster, we
ain't got no time to waste."
By and by we reached the boiling yellow dust where caterpillars were churning around and great big fat
sweaty operators who didn't even look at us were swearing and cussing on
the job. For them to climb a mountain you'd have to pay them double time and
quadruple time today, Saturday.
Japhy and I laughed to think of it. I felt a little
embarrassed
56
with
my silly beret but the cat operators didn't even look and soon we left them
behind and were approaching the final little store lodge at the foot of the
trail. It was a log cabin, set right on the end of the lake, and it was
enclosed in a V of pretty big foothills. Here we stopped and rested awhile on
the steps, we'd hiked approximately four miles but on flat good road, and went
in and bought candy and crackers and Cokes and stuff. Then suddenly Morley,
who'd not been silent on the four-mile hike, and looked funny in his own
outfit which was that immense packboard with air mattress and all (deflated
now) and no hat at all, so that he looked just like he does in the library, but
with big floppy pants of some kind, Morley suddenly remembered he'd forgotten
to drain the crankcase.
"So he forgot to drain the crankcase," I said
noticing their consternation and not knowing much about cars, "so he
forgot to brain the drankbase."
"No, this means that if it gets below freezing tonight
down here the goddamn radiator explodes and we can't drive back home and have to walk twelve miles to Bridgeport
and all and get all hung-up."
"Well
maybe it won't be so cold tonight."
"Can't take a chance," said Morley and by that
time I was pretty mad at him for finding more ways than he could figure to
forget, foul up, disturb, delay, and make go round in circles this relatively simple hiking trip we'd
undertaken.
"What you gonna do? What we gonna do, walk back four miles?"
"Only thing to do, I'll walk back alone, drain the
crankcase, walk back and follow you up the trail and meet you tonight at the camp."
57
"And I'll light a big bonfire," said Japhy,
"and you'll see the glow and just yodel and we'll direct you in."
"That's
simple."
"But you've got to step on it to make it by nightfall
at camp."
"I will, I'll start
back right now."
But then I felt sorry about poor old hapless funny Henry
and said "Ah hell, you mean you're not going to climb with us today, the
hell with the crankcase come on with us."
"It'd cost too much money if that thing froze tonight,
Smith no I think I better go back. I've got plenty of nice thoughts to keep me acquainted with probably what
you two'll be talking about all day, aw hell I'll just start back right
now. Be sure not to roar at bees and don't hurt the cur and if the tennis party
comes on with everybody shirtless don't make eyes at the searchlight or the
sun'll kick a girl's ass right back at you, cats and all and boxes of fruit and
oranges thrown in" and some such statement and with no ado or ceremony
there he went down the road with just a little handwave, muttering and talking
on to himself, so we had to yell "Well so long Henry, hurry up" and
he didn't answer but just walked off shrugging.
"You know," I said, "I think it doesn't make
any difference to him anyway. He's just satisfied to wander around and forget things."
"And pat his belly and look at things as they are,
sorta like in Chuangtse" and Japhy and I had a good laugh watching forlorn
Henry swaggering down all that road we'd only just negotiated, alone and mad.
"Well here we go" said Japhy. "When I get
tired of this big rucksack we'll swap."
58
"I'm ready now. Man, come
on, give it to me now, I feel like carrying something heavy. You don't realize
how good I feel, man, come on!" So we swapped packs and started off.
Both of us were feeling fine and
were talking a blue streak, about anything, literature, the mountains, girls,
Princess, the poets, Japan, our past adventures in life, and I suddenly realized
it was a kind of blessing in disguise Morley had forgotten to drain the
crankcase, otherwise Japhy wouldn't have got in a word edgewise all the blessed
day and now I had a chance to hear his ideas. In the way he did things, hiking,
he reminded me of Mike my boyhood chum who also loved to lead the way, real
grave like Buck Jones, eyes to the distant horizons, like Natty Bumppo,
cautioning me about snapping twigs or "It's too deep here, let's go down
the creek a ways to ford it," or "There'll be mud in that low bottom,
we better skirt around" and dead
serious and glad. I saw all Japhy's boyhood in those eastern Oregon
forests the way he went about it. He walked like he talked, from behind I could
see his toes pointed slightly inward, the way mine do, instead of out; but when it came time to climb he pointed his toes
out, like Chaplin, to make a kind
of easier flapthwap as he trudged. We went across a kind of muddy
riverbottom through dense undergrowth and a few willow trees and came out on
the other side a little wet and started up the trail, which was clearly marked
and named and had been recently repaired by trail crews but as we hit parts where a rock had rolled on the
trail he took great precaution to throw the rock off saying "I used
to work on trail crews, I can't see a trail all mettlesome like that,
Smith." As we climbed the lake began to appear below us and suddenly in
its clear blue pool we could see the deep holes where
59
the lake had its springs, like
black wells, and we could see schools of fish skitter.
"Oh this is like an early
morning in China and I'm five years old in beginningless time!" I sang out
and felt like sitting by the trail and whipping out my little notebook and
writing sketches about it.
"Look over there," sang
Japhy, "yellow aspens. Just put me in the mind of a haiku . . . 'Talking
about the literary life— the yellow aspens.' " Walking in this country you
could understand the perfect gems of haikus the Oriental poets had written,
never getting drunk in the mountains or anything but just going along as fresh
as children writing down what they saw without literary devices or fanciness of
expression. We made up haikus as we climbed, winding up and up now on the
slopes of brush.
"Rocks on the side of the
cliff," I said, "why don't they tumble down?"
"Maybe that's a haiku, maybe
not, it might be a little too complicated," said Japhy. "A real
haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing,
like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow
hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints
like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain
that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles."
"Let's have another."
"I'll make up one of my own
this time, let's see, 'Lake below . . . the black holes the wells make,' no
that's not a haiku goddammit, you never can be too careful about haiku."
"How about making them up
real fast as you go along, spontaneously?"
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"Look here," he cried
happily, "mountain lupine, see the delicate blue color those little
flowers have. And there's some California red poppy over there. The whole
meadow is just powdered with color! Up there by the way is a genuine California
white pine, you never see them much any more."
"You sure know a lot about
birds and trees and stuff."
"I've studied it all my
life." Then also as we went on climbing we began getting more casual and
making funnier sillier talk and pretty soon we got to a bend in the trail where
it was suddenly gladey and dark with shade and a tremendous cataracting stream
was bashing and frothing over scummy rocks and tumbling on down, and over the
stream was a perfect bridge formed by a fallen snag, we got on it and lay
belly-down and dunked our heads down, hair wet, and drank deep as the water
splashed in our faces, like sticking your head by the jet of a dam. I lay there
a good long minute enjoying the sudden coolness.
"This is like an
advertisement for Rainier Ale!" yelled Japhy.
"Let's sit awhile and enjoy
it."
"Boy you don't know how far
we got to go yet!"
"Well I'm not tired!"
"Well you'll be,
Tiger."
61
We went on, and I was immensely
pleased with the way the trail had a kind of immortal look to it, in the early
afternoon now, the way the side of the grassy hill seemed to be clouded with
ancient gold dust and the bugs flipped over rocks and the wind sighed in
shimmering dances over the hot rocks, and the way the trail would suddenly come
into a cool shady part with big trees overhead, and here the light deeper. And
the way the lake below us soon became a toy lake with those black well holes
perfectly visible still, and the giant cloud shadows on the lake, and the
tragic little road winding away where poor Morley was walking back.
"Can you see Morl down back
there?"
Japhy took a long look. "I
see a little cloud of dust, maybe that's him comin back already." But it
seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks
and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed
snag bridges and undersea greennesses, there was something inexpressibly broken
in my heart as though I'd lived before and walked this trail, under similar
circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important
journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it
all. The woods do that to you, they
62
always look familiar, long lost,
like the face of a long-dead relative, like
an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water,
most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all
the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago
and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy,
even, I felt, with flashes of sudden
remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and
dreaming in the grass. As we got higher we got more tired and now like two true
mountainclimbers we weren't talking any more and didn't have to talk and were
glad, in fact Japhy mentioned that, turning to me after a half-hour's silence,
"This is the way I like it, when you get going there's just no need to
talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy." So
huddled in our own thoughts we tromped on, Japhy using that gazotsky trudge I
mentioned, and myself finding my own true step, which was short steps slowly
patiently going up the mountain at one mile
an hour, so I was always thirty yards behind him and when we had any haikus
now we'd yell them fore and aft. Pretty soon we got to the top of the
part of the trail that was a trail no more,
to the incomparable dreamy meadow, which had a beautiful pond, and after
that it was boulders and nothing but
boulders.
"Only sign we have now to
know which way we're going, is ducks."
"What's ducks?"
"See those boulders over there?"
"See those boulders over
there! Why God man, I see five miles of boulders leading up to that
mountain."
"See the little pile of rocks on that near boulder
there by the
63
pine? That's a duck, put up by other climbers, maybe that's
one I put up myself in 'fifty-four I'm not sure. We just go from boulder to
boulder from now on keeping a sharp eye for ducks then we get a general idea
how to raggle along. Although of course we know which way we're going, that big
cliff face up there is where our plateau is."
"Plateau? My God you mean
that ain't the top of the mountain?"
"Of course not, after that
we got a plateau and then scree and then more rocks and we get to a final
alpine lake no biggern this pond and then comes the final climb over one thousand
feet almost straight up boy to the top of the world where you'll see all
California and parts of Nevada and the wind'll blow right through your
pants."
"Ow
. . . How long does it all take?"
"Why the only thing we can
expect to make tonight is our camp up there on that plateau. I call it a
plateau, it ain't that at all, it's a shelf
between heights."
But the top and the end of the
trail was such a beautiful spot I said: "Boy look at this ..." A dreamy meadow, pines at one
end, the pond, the clear fresh air, the afternoon clouds rushing golden . . .
"Why don't we just sleep here tonight, I don't think I've ever seen a more
beautiful park."
"Ah this is nowhere. It's
great of course, but we might wake up tomorrow morning and find three dozen
schoolteachers on horseback frying bacon in our backyard. Where we're going you
can bet your ass there won't be one human being, and if there is, I'll be a
spotted horse's ass. Or maybe just one mountainclimber, or two, but I don't
expect so at this time of the year. You know the snow's about to come here any
time now. If it comes tonight it's goodbye me and you."
64
"Well goodbye Japhy. But let's rest here and drink
some water and admire the meadow." We were feeling tired and great. We
spread out in the grass and rested and swapped packs and strapped them on and
were rarin to go. Almost instantaneously the grass ended and the boulders started;
we got up on the first one and from that point on it was just a matter of
jumping from boulder to boulder, gradually climbing, climbing, five miles up a
valley of boulders getting steeper and steeper with immense crags on both
sides forming the walls of the valley, till near the cliff face we'd be scrambling up the boulders, it seemed. "And what's behind that cliff face?"
"There's
high grass up there, shrubbery, scattered boulders, beautiful meandering creeks that
have ice in 'em even in the afternoon, spots of snow, tremendous trees, and one
boulder just about as big as two of Alvah's cottages piled on top the other which leans over and makes a kind of
concave cave for us to camp at, lightin a big bonfire that'll throw heat
against the wall. Then after that the grass
and the timber ends. That'll be at
nine thousand just about."
With my
sneakers it was as easy as pie to just dance nimbly from
boulder to boulder, but after a while I noticed how gracefully Japhy was doing it and he
just ambled from boulder to boulder,
sometimes in a deliberate dance with his legs crossing from right to
left, right to left and for a while I followed his every step but then I
learned it was better for me to just spontaneously
pick my own boulders and make a ragged dance of my own.
"The secret of this kind of
climbing," said Japhy, "is like Zen.
Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world,
actually easier than walking on flat ground which is
65
monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find
yourself on some other boulder you
picked out for no special reason at all, just like Zen." Which it was.
We didn't
talk much now. It got tiresome on the leg muscles. We spent
hours, about three, going up that long, long valley. In that time it grew to
late afternoon and the light was growing amber and shadows were falling ominously in the valley
of dry boulders and instead, though, of making you feel scared it gave you that
immortal feeling again. The ducks were all
laid out easy to see: on top of a boulder you'd stand, and look ahead,
and spot a duck (usually only two flat rocks on top of each other maybe with
one round one on top for decoration) and you aimed in that general direction.
The purpose of these ducks, as laid out by all previous climbers, was to save a mile or two of wandering around in
the immense valley. Meanwhile our
roaring creek was still at it, but thinner and more quiet now, running
from the cliff face itself a mile up the
valley in a big black stain I could see in the gray rock.
Jumping from boulder to boulder
and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't
fall when you get into the rhythm of the
dance. I looked back down the valley sometimes and was surprised to see
how high we'd come, and to see farther horizons of mountains now back there. Our beautiful trail-top park was like a
little glen of the Forest of Arden. Then the climbing got steeper, the
sun got redder, and pretty soon I began to see patches of snow in the shade of
some rocks. We got up to where the cliff face seemed to loom over us. At one
point I saw Japhy throw down his pack and
danced my way up to him.
"Well this is where we'll drop our gear and climb
those few
66
hundred feet up the side of that
cliff, where you see there it's shallower, and find that camp. I remember it.
In fact you can sit here and rest or beat your bishop while I go ramblin
around there, I like to ramble by myself."
Okay. So I
sat down and changed my wet socks and changed soaking undershirt for dry one and
crossed my legs and rested and whistled for about a half-hour, a very pleasant occupation,
and Japhy got back and said he'd found the camp. I thought it would be a little
jaunt to our resting place but it took
almost another hour to jump up the steep boulders, climb around some,
get to the level of the cliff-face plateau, and there, on flat grass more or less, hike about two hundred yards to
where a huge gray rock towered among pines. Here now the earth was a
splendorous thing—snow on the ground, in melting
patches in the grass, and gurgling creeks, and the huge silent rock mountains on both sides, and a wind
blowing, and the smell of heather.
We forded a lovely little creek, shallow as your hand, pearl pure lucid water, and got to the huge rock. Here
were old charred logs where other mountainclimbers had camped.
"And where's Matterhorn mountain?"
"You can't see it from here,
but"—pointing up the farther long
plateau and a scree gorge twisting to the right—"around that draw and up two miles or so and then we'll
be at the foot of it."
"Wow, heck, whoo, that'll take us a whole other
day!"
"Not when you're travelin with me, Smith."
"Well Ryderee, that's okay with me."
"Okay Smithee and now how's
about we relax and enjoy ourselves and cook
up some supper and wait for ole Morleree?"
So we unpacked our packs and laid things out and smoked
67
and had a good time. Now the mountains were getting that
pink tinge, I mean the rocks, they were just solid rock covered with the atoms
of dust accumulated there since beginningless
time. In fact I was afraid of those jagged monstrosities all around and over
our heads.
"They're so silent!" I said.
"Yeah
man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of
thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like
praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop
all our frettin and foolin." Japhy got out the tea, Chinese tea, and sprinkled some in a tin pot, and had the fire
going meanwhile, a small one to begin with, the sun was still on us,
and stuck a long stick tight down under a
few big rocks and made himself something to hang the teapot on and
pretty soon the water was boiling and he
poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups. I myself'd gotten the water
from the stream, which was cold and pure like snow and the crystal-lidded eyes of heaven. Therefore, the tea was by
far the most pure and thirstquenching tea I ever drank in all my life, it made you want to drink more and
more, it actually quenched your thirst and of course it swam around hot in your belly.
"Now you understand the
Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you
about the first sip is joy the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the
fourth is madness, the fifth is
ecstasy."
"Just about old buddy."
That rock we were camped against
was a marvel It was thirty feet high and
thirty feet at base, a perfect square almost, and twisted trees arched over it and peeked down on us. From
68
the base it went outward, forming a
concave, so if rain came we'd be partially covered. "How did
this immense sonumbitch ever get here?"
"It
probably was left here by the retreating glacier. See over there that field
of snow?"
"Yeah."
"That's
the glacier what's left of it. Either that or this rock tumbled here from inconceivable
prehistoric mountains we can't understand,
or maybe it just landed here when the frig-gin mountain range itself burst out of the ground in the Jurassic
upheaval. Ray when you're up here you're not sittin in a Berkeley tea room. This is the beginning and the
end of the world right here. Look at
all those patient Buddhas lookin at us
saying nothing."
"And
you come out here by yourself. . . ."
"For
weeks on end, just like John Muir, climb around all by myself
following quartzite veins or making posies of flowers for my camp,
or just walking around naked singing, and cook my supper and laugh."
"Japhy
I gotta hand it to you, you're the happiest little cat in the world and the greatest by
God you are. I'm sure glad I'm learning all
this. This place makes me feel devoted, too, I mean, you know I have a prayer, did you know the prayer I use?"
"What?"
"I sit
down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies
one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy
Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved,
equally a coming Buddha,' then I run on, say, to 'David O. Selznick,
equally empty, equally to be loved, equally
a coming Buddha' though I don't
69
use names like David O. Selznick,
just people I know because when I say the words 'equally a coming
Buddha' I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue
eyes behind those glasses, when you think 'equally a coming Buddha' you think of those eyes and you
really do suddenly see the true secret
serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's
eyes."
"That's great, Ray,"
and Japhy took out his notebook and wrote
down the prayer, and shook his head in wonder. "That's really really
great. I'm going to teach this prayer to the monks I meet in Japan.
There's nothing wrong with you Ray, your only
trouble is you never learned to get out to spots like this, you've let
the world drown you in its horseshit and you've been vexed . . . though as I
say comparisons are odious, but what
we're sayin now is true."
He took his bulgur rough cracked
wheat and dumped a couple of packages of
dried vegetables in and put it all in the pot to be ready to be boiled
at dusk. We began listening for the yodels
of Henry Morley, which didn't come. We began to worry about him.
"The trouble about all this,
dammit, if he fell off a boulder and broke
his leg there'd be no one to help him. It's dangerous to ... I do it all by myself but I'm pretty
good, I'm a mountain goat."
"I'm
gettin hungry."
"Me too dammit, I wish he
gets here soon. Let's ramble around and eat snowballs and drink water and
wait."
We did
this, investigating the upper end of the flat plateau, and came
back. By now the sun was gone behind the western wall of our valley and it was getting darker, pinker,
colder, more hues of purple began to steal across the jags. The sky
70
was deep. We even began to see pale
stars, at least one or two. Suddenly we heard a distant
"Yodelayhee" and Japhy leaped up and jumped to the top of a boulder and yelled "Hoo
hoo hoo!" The Yodelayhee came back.
"How far is he?"
"My God from the sound of it
he's not even started. He's not even at the beginning of the valley of
boulders. He can never make it
tonight."
"What'll we do?"
"Let's go to the rock cliff
and sit on the edge and call him an hour. Let's bring these peanuts and raisins
and munch on 'em and wait. Maybe he's not
so far as I think."
We went over to the promontory
where we could see the whole valley and Japhy sat down in full lotus posture
crosslegged on a rock and took out his wooden juju prayerbeads and prayed. That is, he simply held the beads in
his hands, the hands upsidedown with
thumbs touching, and stared straight ahead
and didn't move a bone. I sat down as best I could on another rock and
we both said nothing and meditated. Only I meditated with my eyes closed. The
silence was an intense roar. From where we
were, the sound of the creek, the gurgle and slapping talk of the creek, was
blocked off by rocks. We heard several more melancholy Yodelayhees and
answered them but it seemed farther and farther away each time. When I opened my eyes the pink was more purple all
the time. The stars began to flash. I fell into deep meditation, felt
that the mountains were indeed Buddhas and
our friends, and I felt the weird sensation that it was strange that
there were only three men in this whole immense valley: the mystic number three. Nirmanakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Dharmakaya.
I prayed for the safety and in fact
the eternal happiness of poor Morley.
71
Once I opened my eyes and saw Japhy
sitting there rigid as a rock and I felt like laughing he looked so
funny. But the mountains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that
matter so was I, and in fact laughter is solemn.
It was
beautiful. The pinkness vanished and then it was all purple dusk
and the roar of the silence was like a wash of diamond waves going through the
liquid porches of our ears, enough to soothe
a man a thousand years. I prayed for Japhy, for his future safety and happiness
and eventual Buddhahood. It was all
completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.
"Rocks
are space," I thought, "and space is illusion." I had a million thoughts. Japhy had his.
I was amazed at the way he meditated with his eyes open. And I was mostly
humanly amazed that this tremendous little guy who eagerly studied Oriental poetry and anthropology and ornithology
and everything else in the books and was a tough little adventurer of trails and mountains should also suddenly whip out
his pitiful beautiful wooden prayerbeads and solemnly pray there, like an oldfashioned saint of the deserts certainly,
but so amazing to see it in America with its steel mills and airfields.
The world ain't so bad, when you got
Japhies, I thought, and felt glad. All the aching muscles and the hunger
in my belly were bad enough, and the
surroundant dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe
you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting there meditating and
praying for the world with another earnest
young man—'twere good enough to have been
born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky
Ways of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom unjaundiced eyes,
friends. I felt like telling Japhy everything I thought but I knew it didn't
matter and more-
72
over
he knew it anyway and silence is the golden mountain.
"Yodelayhee,"
sang Morley, and now it was dark, and Japhy said "Well, from the looks of
things he's still far away. He has enough sense to pitch his own camp down there tonight so let's go back to our camp and cook supper."
"Okay." And we yelled
"Hoo" a couple of times reassuringly and gave up poor Morl for the
night. He did have enough sense, we knew.
And as it turned out he did, and pitched his camp, wrapped up in his two
blankets on top of the air mattress, and slept the night out in that
incomparably happy meadow with the pond and
the pines, telling us about it when he
finally reached us the next day.
I rousted
about and got a lot of little pieces of wood to make kindling for the fire and then
I went around gathering bigger pieces and finally I was hunting out huge logs,
easy to find all
over the place. We had a fire that Morley must have seen from five miles away, except we were way up behind the cliff
face, cut off from his view. It cast mighty blasts of heat against our cliff,
the cliff absorbed it and threw it back, we were in a hot room except that the
ends of our noses were nippy from sticking
them out of that area to get firewood and water. Japhy put the bulgur in
the pot with water and started
73
it boiling and stirred it around and
meanwhile busied himself with the mixings for the chocolate pudding
and started boiling that
in a separate smaller pot out of my knapsack. He also brewed a fresh pot of tea. Then he whipped out his double set of
chopsticks and pretty soon we had our supper ready and laughed over it. It was
the most delicious supper of all time. Up
out of the orange glow of our fire you could see immense systems of uncountable stars, either as
individual blazers, or in low Venus droppers, or vast Milky Ways
incommensurate with human understanding,
all cold, blue, silver, but our food and our fire was pink and goodies.
And true to what Japhy had predicted, I had absolutely not a jot of appetite
for alcohol, I'd forgotten all about it,
the altitude was too high, the exercise
too heavy, the air too brisk, the air itself was enough to get your drunk ass
drunk. It was a tremendous supper, food is always better eaten in
doleful little pinchfuls off the ends of chopsticks,
no gobbling, the reason why Darwin's law of survival applies best to China: if
you don't know how to handle a chopstick and stick it in that family pot
with the best of 'em, you'll starve. I
ended up flupping it all up with my forefinger anyhow.
Supper done,
Japhy assiduously got to scraping the pots with a wire scraper and got me to
bring water, which I did dipping a leftover can from other campers into the
fire pool of stars, and came back with a snowball to boot, and Japhy washed the dishes in preboiled water. "Usually I don't
wash my dishes, I just wrap 'em up in my blue bandana, cause it really
doesn't matter . . . though they don't appreciate this little bit of wisdom in the horse-soap building thar on Madison
Avenue, what you call it, that
English firm, Urber and Urber, whatall, damn hell and upsidedown boy
I'll be as tight as Dick's hatband if
74
I don't feel like takin out my star
map and seein what the lay of the pack is tonight. That houndsapack up there more uncountable than all your favorite Surangamy
sutries, boy." So he whips out
his star map and turns it around a little, and adjusts, and looks, and says, "It's exactly
eight-forty-eight p.m."
"How do you know."
"Sirius
wouldn't be where Sirius is, if it wasn't eight-forty-eight p.m.
. . . You know what I like about you, Ray, you've woke me up
to the true language of this country which is the language of the working men,
railroad men, loggers. D'yever hear them guys talk?"
"I
shore did. I had a guy, an oil rig driver, truck, picked me up in Houston Texas one night
round about midnight after some little
faggot who owned some motel courts called of all things and rather
appropriately my dear, Dandy Courts, had left me off and said if you can't get
a ride come on in sleep on my floor, so I wait about an hour in the empty road
and here comes this rig and it's driven by a Cherokee he said he was but his
name was Johnson or Ally Reynolds or some damn thing and as he talked starting
in with a speech like 'Well boy I left my mammy's cabin before you knew the
smell of the river and came west to drive myself mad in the East Texas
oilfield' and all kinds of rhythmic talk and with every bang of rhythm he'd ram
at his clutch and his various gears and pop
up the truck and had her roaring down the road about seventy miles an
hour with momentum only when his story got rolling with him, magnificent,
that's what I call poetry."
"That's
what I mean. You oughta hear old Burnie Byers talk up that
talk up in the Skagit country, Ray you just gotta go up there."
75
"Okay I will."
Japhy,
kneeling there studying his star map, leaning forward slightly to peek up through the overhanging gnarled old rock
country trees, with his goatee and all, looked, with that mighty grawfaced rock behind him, like, exactly
like the vision I had of the old Zen Masters of China out in the wilderness. He
was leaning forward on his knees,
upward looking, as if with a holy sutra in his hands. Pretty soon he
went to the snowbank and brought back the chocolate pudding which was now ice cold and absolutely delicious beyond words. We
ate it all up. "Maybe we oughta leave some for Morley." "Ah it won't keep, it'll melt in the morning
sun." As the fire stopped roaring and just got to be red coals, but big
ones six feet long, the night interposed its icy crystal feel 1 more and more
but with the smell of smoking logs it was as delicious as chocolate pudding.
For a while I went on a little walk by
myself, out by the shallow iced creek, and sat meditating against a
stump of dirt and the huge mountain walls on both
sides of our valley were silent masses. Too cold to do this more than a
minute. As I came back our orange fire casting its glow on the big rock, and Japhy kneeling and peering up at the
sky, and all of it ten thousand feet above the gnashing world, was a picture of peace and good sense. There was another
aspect of Japhy that amazed me: his tremendous and tender sense of charity. He was always giving things, always practicing
what the Buddhists call the Paramita of Dana, the perfection of charity.
Now when I came back and sat down
by the fire he said "Well Smith it's about time you owned a set of juju
beads you can have these," and he handed me the brown wood beads run
together over a strong string with the string, black
76
and shiny, coming out at the large bead at the end in a
pretty loop.
"Aw you can't give me
something like this, these things come from
Japan don't they?"
"I've got another set of
black ones. Smith that prayer you gave me tonight is worth that set of juju
beads, but you can have it anyway." A few minutes later he cleaned out the
rest of the chocolate pudding but made sure that I got most of it. Then when he
laid boughs over the rock of our clearing and the poncho over that he made sure
his sleeping bag was farther away from the
fire than mine so I would sure to be warm. He was always practicing charity. In fact he taught me, and a week
later I was giving him nice new undershirts I'd discovered in the Goodwill
store. He'd turn right around and make me a gift of a plastic container to keep
food in. For a joke I'd give him a gift of
a huge flower from Alvah's yard. Solemnly
a day later he'd bring me a little bouquet of flowers picked in the street plots of Berkeley. "And
you can keep the sneakers too," he said. "I've got another pair older
than those but just as good."
"Aw I can't be taking all your things."
"Smith you don't realize it's
a privilege to practice giving presents to others." The way he did it was
charming; there was nothing glittery and
Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up
things but they had the charm of
usefulness and sadness of his giving.
We rolled
into our sleeping bags, it was freezing cold now, about eleven o'clock, and talked
a while more before one of us just didn't
answer from the pillow and pretty soon we were asleep. While he snored I woke up and just lay flat back with my eyes to the stars and thanked God I'd come on
this moun-
77
tain climb. My legs felt better, my whole body felt strong.
The crack of the dying logs was like Japhy
making little comments on my
happiness. I looked at him, his head was buried way under inside his duck-down
bag. His little huddled form was the
only thing I could see for miles of darkness that was so packed and
concentrated with eager desire to be good. I thought, "What a strange
thing is man . . . like in the Bible it says, Who knoweth the spirit of man
that looketh upward? This poor kid ten
years younger than I am is making me look like a fool forgetting all the ideals
and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and
disappointment, what does he care if he hasn't got any money: he doesn't need
any money, all he needs is his rucksack
with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes
and off he goes and enjoys the privileges
of a millionaire in surroundings like this. And what gouty millionaire could
get up this rock anyhow? It took us
all day to climb." And I promised myself that I would begin a new life. "All over the West, and
the mountains in the East, and the desert, I'll tramp with a rucksack
and make it the pure way." I went to
sleep after burying my nose under the sleeping
bag and woke up around dawn shivering, the ground cold had seeped through the poncho and through
the bag and my ribs were up against a damper damp than the damp of a cold bed. My breath was coming out in steams. I
rolled over to the other ribs and slept more: my dreams were pure cold dreams like ice water, happy dreams, no
nightmares.
When I woke
up again and the sunlight was a pristine orange pouring through the crags to the east and down through our fragrant pine boughs, I felt like I did when I
was a boy and it was time to get up and go play all day Saturday, in
overalls. Japhy was already up singing and blowing on his hands at a
78
small fire. White frost was on the
ground. He rushed out a way and yelled out "Yodelayhee" and by God we heard it come
right back at us from Morley, closer than the night before. "He's on his
way now. Wake up Smith and have a hot cupa tea,
do you good!" I got up and fished my sneakers out of the sleeping
bag where they'd been kept warm all night, and put them on, and put on my
beret, and jumped up and ran a few blocks
in the grass. The shallow creek was iced over except in the middle where a rill of gurgles rolled like
tinkly tinkly. I fell down on my belly and took a deep drink,'wetting my
face. There's no feeling in the world like
washing your face in cold water on a mountain morning. Then I went back
and Japhy was heating up the remains of
last night's supper and it was still good.
Then we went out on the edge of the cliff and Hooed at Morley, and suddenly we could see him, a tiny
figure two miles down the valley of
boulders moving like a little animate being in the immense void.
"That little dot down there is our witty friend
Morley," said Japhy in his funny resounding voice of a lumberjack.
In about two
hours Morley was within talking distance of us and started right in talking as he
negotiated the final boulders, to where we were sitting in the now warm sun
on a rock waiting.
"The
Ladies' Aid Society says I should come up and see if you boys would like to have blue
ribbons pinned on your shirts, they say
there's plenty of pink lemonade left and Lord Mountbatten is getting mighty impatient. You think they'll investigate the source of that recent trouble in
the Mid-East, or learn appreciate coffee better. I should think with a couple
of literary gentlemen like you two
they should learn to mind their manners . . ." and so on and so on,
for no reason at all, yak-
79
king in the happy blue morning sky over rocks with his
slaking grin, sweating a little from the long morning's work. "Well
Morley you ready to climb Matterhorn?" "I'm ready just as soon as I can
change these wet socks."
At about
noon we started out, leaving our big packs at the camp where nobody was likely to
be till next year anyway, and went up the scree valley with just some food
and first-aid kits. The valley was longer than it looked. In no time at all it
was two o'clock in the afternoon and the sun was getting that
later more golden look and a wind was rising and I began to
think "By gosh how we ever gonna climb that mountain, tonight?"
I put it up to Japhy who said:
"You're right, we'll have to hurry."
"Why don't we just forget it and
go on home?" "Aw come on Tiger, we'll make a run up that hill and
then we'll go home." The valley was long and long and long. And at the
top end it got very steep and I began to be a little afraid of falling
down, the rocks were small and it got slippery and my ankles
were in pain from yesterday's muscle strain anyway. But Morley kept walking
and talking and I noticed his tremendous endurance. Japhy took his pants off so
he could
80
look just like an Indian, I mean
stark naked, except for a jockstrap, and hiked almost a quarter-mile ahead of
us, sometimes waiting
a while, to give us time to catch up, then went on, moving fast, wanting to
climb the mountain today. Morley came
second, about fifty yards ahead of me all the way. I was in no hurry.
Then as it got later afternoon I went faster and decided to pass Morley and join Japhy. Now we were at about eleven
thousand feet and it was cold and there was a lot of snow and to the east we could see immense snowcapped ranges and whooee levels of valleyland below them, we
were already practically on top of
California. At one point I had to scramble, like the others, on a narrow
ledge, around a butte of rock, and it really
scared me: the fall was a hundred feet, enough to break your neck, with
another little ledge letting you bounce a minute preparatory to a nice goodbye
one-thousand-foot drop. The wind was
whipping now. Yet that whole afternoon, even more than the other, was
filled with old premonitions or memories, as though I'd been there before,
scrambling on these rocks, for other purposes more ancient, more serious, more
simple. We finally got to the foot of Matterhorn where there was a most beautiful small lake unknown to the eyes of most men
in this world, seen by only a handful of mountain-climbers, a small lake at
eleven thousand some odd feet with snow on the edges of it and beautiful
flowers and a beautiful meadow, an
alpine meadow, flat and dreamy, upon which I immediately threw myself and took my shoes off. Japhy'd been there a half-hour when I made it, and it was cold
now and his clothes were on again.
Morley came up behind us smiling. We sat there looking up at the
imminent steep scree slope of the final
crag of Matterhorn. "That don't
look much, we can do it!" I said glad now.
81
"No, Ray, that's more than
it looks. Do you realize that's a thousand
feet more?"
"That much?"
"Unless we make a run up
there, double-time, we'll never make it down again to our camp before nightfall
and never make it down to the car at the
lodge before tomorrow morning at,
well at midnight."
"Phew."
"I'm
tired," said Morley. "I don't think I'll try it."
"Well
that's right," I said. "The whole purpose of mountain-climbing to me isn't just to show
off you can get to the top, it's getting out to this wild country."
"Well I'm gonna go," said Japhy.
"Well if you're gonna go I'm goin with you."
"Morley?"
"I don't think I can make
it. I'll wait here." And that wind was strong, too strong, I felt that as
soon as we'd be a few hundred feet up the
slope it might hamper our climbing.
Japhy took a small pack of
peanuts and raisins and said "This'll
be our gasoline, boy. You ready Ray to make a double-time run?"
"Ready. What would I say to
the boys in The Place if I came all this way only to give up at the last
minute?"
"It's late so let's
hurry." Japhy started up walking very rapidly
and then even running sometimes where the climb had to be to the right
or left along ridges of scree. Scree is long landslides
of rocks and sand, very difficult to scramble through, always little avalanches going on. At every few
steps we took it seemed we were going higher and higher on a terrifying elevator,
I gulped when I turned around to look back and see all of the state of
California it would seem stretching out in three
82
directions under huge blue skies
with frightening planetary space clouds and immense vistas of distant valleys
and even plateaus and for all I knew whole Nevadas out there. It was terrifying to look down and see Morley a dreaming
spot by the little lake waiting for us. "Oh why didn't I stay with
old Henry?" I thought. I now began to
be afraid to go any higher from sheer
fear of being too high. I began to be afraid of being blown away by the
wind. All the nightmares I'd ever had about falling off mountains and
precipitous buildings ran through my head in perfect clarity. Also with
every twenty steps we took upward we both
became completely exhausted.
"That's because
of the high altitude now
Ray," said Japhy
sitting beside me panting. "So have raisins and peanuts and you'll
see what kick it gives you." And each time it gave us such a
tremendous kick we both jumped up without a word and climbed another twenty, thirty steps. Then sat down
again, panting, sweating in the cold wind, high on top of the world our noses sniffling like the noses of
little boys playing late Saturday
afternoon their final little games in winter. Now the wind began to howl
like the wind in movies about the Shroud of
Tibet. The steepness began to be too much for me; I was afraid now to
look back any more; I peeked: I couldn't even
make out Morley by the tiny lake.
"Hurry
it up," yelled Japhy from a hundred feet ahead. "It's getting
awfully late." I looked up to the peak. It was right there, I'd be there in five minutes.
"Only a half-hour to go!" yelled Japhy.
I didn't believe it. In five minutes of scrambling angrily upward I fell
down and looked up and it was still just as far away. What I didn't like about
that peak-top was that the clouds of all the
world were blowing right through it like fog.
"Wouldn't see anything up there anyway," I
muttered. "Oh
83
why did I ever let myself into
this?" Japhy was way ahead of me now, he'd left the peanuts and raisins
with me, it was with a kind of lonely solemnity now he had decided to rush to
the top if it killed him. He didn't sit down any more. Soon he was a whole football field, a hundred
yards ahead of me, getting smaller. I looked back and like Lot's wife that did
it. "This is too high!" I yelled to Japhy in a panic.
He didn't hear me. I raced a few more feet up and fell exhausted on my belly,
slipping back just a little. "This is too high!" I yelled. I
was really scared. Supposing I'd start to slip back for good, these screes might start sliding any time anyway. That
damn mountain goat Japhy, I could see him jumping through the foggy air up
ahead from rock to rock, up, up, just the flash of his boot bottoms. "How
can I keep up with a maniac like that?" But with nutty desperation I followed him. Finally I came to a kind of ledge where I could sit at a level angle
instead of having to cling not to
slip, and I nudged my whole body inside the ledge just to hold me there tight, so the wind would not
dislodge me, and I looked down and around and I had had it. "I'm
stayin here!" I yelled to Japhy.
"Come on Smith, only another
five minutes. I only got a hundred feet to go!"
"I'm staying right here! It's too high!"
He said nothing and went on. I
saw him collapse and pant and get up and
make his run again.
I nudged myself closer into the
ledge and closed my eyes and thought "Oh what a life this is, why do we
have to be born in the first place, and only
so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors
as huge mountains and rock and empty space," and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, "When you get to the
top of a moun-
84
tain, keep climbing." The saying made my hair stand on
end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats. Now it was
enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed for being born at all.
"In fact when Japhy gets to the top of that crag he will keep
climbing, the way the wind's blowing. Well this old philosopher is staying
right here," and I closed my eyes. "Besides," I thought,
"rest and be kind, you don't have to prove anything." Suddenly I
heard a beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity in
the wind, and looked up, and it was Japhy standing on top of Matterhorn peak letting out his triumphant
mountain-conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy. It was
beautiful. It was funny, too, up here on the not-so-funny top of California
and in all that rushing fog. But I had to hand it to him, the guts, the
endurance, the sweat, and now the crazy human singing: whipped cream on top of
ice cream. I didn't have enough strength to answer his yodel. He ran around up
there and went out of sight to investigate the little flat top of some kind (he
said) that ran a few feet west and then dropped sheer back down maybe as far as
I care to the sawdust floors of Virginia
City. It was insane. I could hear him yelling at me but I just nudged
farther in my protective nook, trembling. I looked down at the small lake where
Morley was lying on his back with a blade of grass in his mouth and said out
loud "Now there's the karma of these three men here: Japhy Ryder gets to
his triumphant mountaintop and makes it, I almost make it and have to give up
and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all is that poet's poet
lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming
by a gurgling plage, goddammit they'll never get me up here again."
85
I really was
amazed by the wisdom of Morley now: "Him with all his goddamn pictures of snowcapped Swiss
Alps" I thought.
Then suddenly everything was just
like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running
down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted
heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long
crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the
sides of the world and in that flash I realized it's impossible to
fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up
and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge
leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about five
minutes I'd guess Japhy Ryder and I (in my sneakers, driving the heels of my
sneakers right into sand, rock, boulders, I didn't care any more I was so
anxious to get down out of there) came leaping and yelling like mountain goats
or I'd say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago, enough to raise the
hair on the head of the meditating Morley by the lake, who said he looked up
and saw us flying down and couldn't believe it. In fact with one of my greatest
leaps and loudest screams of joy I came flying right down to the
86
edge of the lake and dug my sneakered heels into the mud
and just fell sitting there, glad. Japhy was already taking his shoes off and pouring sand and pebbles out. It was
great. I took off my sneakers and poured out a couple of buckets of lava
dust and said "Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain."
"And that's what they mean
by the saying, When you get to the top of a
mountain keep climbing, Smith."
"Dammit
that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life. I wish I'd a had a
tape recorder to take it down."
"Those
things aren't made to be heard by the people below," says Japhy
dead serious.
"By God you're right, all
those sedentary bums sitting around on pillows hearing the cry of the
triumphant mountain smasher, they don't
deserve it. But when I looked up and saw you running down that mountain
I suddenly understood everything."
"Ah a little satori for Smith today," says
Morley. "What
were you doing down here?" "Sleeping,
mostly."
"Well dammit I didn't get to
the top. Now I'm ashamed of myself because
now that I know how to come down a mountain I know how to go up
and that I can't fall off, but now
it's too late."
"We'll come back next summer
Ray and climb it. Do you realize that this
is the first time you've been mountainclimbin and you left old veteran
Morley here way behind you?"
"Sure,"
said Morley. "Do you think, Japhy, they would assign Smith the title of Tiger for
what he done today?"
87
"Oh sure," says Japhy, and I really felt
proud. I was a Tiger.
"Well dammit I'll be a lion next time we get up
here."
"Let's go men, now we've got
a long long way to go back down this scree
to our camp and down that valley of boulders and then down that lake trail, wow, I doubt if we can make it before pitch dark."
"It'll be
mostly okay." Morley pointed to the sliver of moon in the pinkening deepening blue
sky. "That oughta light us a way."
"Let's
go." We all got up and started back. Now when I went around that ledge that had scared
me it was just fun and a lark, I just skipped and jumped and danced along and I
had really learned that you can't fall off
a mountain. Whether you can fall off a mountain or not I don't know, but
I had learned that you can't. That was the way it struck me.
It was a joy, though, to get down
into the valley and lose sight of all that open sky space underneath everything
and finally, as it got graying five o'clock, about a hundred yards from the
other boys and walking alone, to just pick my way singing and thinking along
the little black cruds of a deer trail
through the rocks, no call to think or look ahead or worry, just follow
the little balls of deer crud with your eyes cast down and enjoy life. At one
point I looked and saw crazy Japhy who'd climbed for fun to the top of a snow
slope and skied right down to the bottom,
about a hundred yards, on his boots
and the final few yards on his back, yippeeing and glad. Not only that
but he'd taken off his pants again and wrapped them around his neck. This pants bit of his was simply he said for comfort, which is true, besides nobody around
to see him anyway, though I figured that when he went mountainclimb-
88
ing with girls it didn't make any difference to him. I
could hear Morley talking to him in the great lonely valley: even across the rocks you could tell it was his voice.
Finally I followed my deer trail so assiduously I was by myself going
along ridges and down across creekbottoms completely out of sight of them,
though I could hear them, but I trusted the instinct of my sweet little
millennial deer and true enough, just as it was getting dark their ancient
trail took me right to the edges of the
familiar shallow creek (where they stopped to drink for the last five thousand years) and there was the glow of
Japhy's bonfire making the side of the big rock orange and gay. The moon was bright high in the sky.
"Well that moon's gonna save
our ass, we got eight miles to go downtrail boys."
We ate a little and drank a lot of tea and arranged all our
stuff. I had never had a happier moment in
my life than those lonely moments
coming down that little deer trace and when we hiked off with our packs
I turned to take a final look up that way, it was dark now, hoping to see a few
dear little deer, nothing in sight, and I thanked everything up that way. It
had been like when you're a little boy and have spent a whole day rambling alone in the woods and fields and on the dusk
homeward walk you did it all with your eyes to the ground, scuffling, thinking,
whistling, like little Indian boys must
feel when they
follow their striding
fathers from Russian River to
Shasta two hundred years ago, like little Arab boys following their fathers,
their fathers' trails; that singsong little joyful solitude, nose sniffling,
like a little girl pulling her little brother home on the sled and they're both
singing little ditties of their imagination and making faces at the ground and
just being themselves before they have to go in the kitchen and put on a
straight face again for the world
89
of seriousness. "Yet what could
be more serious than to follow a deer trace to get to your water?" I thought. We got to the cliff and started down the five-mile valley
of boulders, in clear moonlight now, it was quite easy to dance down
from boulder to boulder, the boulders were snow white, with patches of deep black shadow. Everything was
cleanly whitely beautiful in the moonlight. Sometimes you could see the silver flash
of the creek. Far down were the pines of the meadow park and the pool of the
pond.
At this point my feet were unable
to go on. I called Japhy and apologized. I couldn't take any more jumps. There
were blisters not only on the bottoms but on the sides of my feet, from there
having been no protection all yesterday and today.
So Japhy swapped and let me wear his boots.
With these big lightweight
protective boots on I knew I could go on
fine. It was a great new feeling to be able to jump from rock to rock
without having to feel the pain through the thin sneakers. On the other hand,
for Japhy, it was also a relief to be
suddenly lightfooted and he enjoyed it. We made double-time down the
valley. But every step was getting us bent, now, we were all really tired. With
the heavy packs it was difficult to control those thigh muscles that you need
to go down a mountain, which is sometimes harder than going up. And there were all those boulders to surmount,
for sometimes we'd be walking in sand awhile and our path would be blocked by boulders and we had to climb them and
jump from one to the other then
suddenly no more boulders and we had to
jump down to the sand. Then we'd be trapped in impassable thickets and
had to go around them or try to crash through and sometimes I'd get stuck in a
thicket with my rucksack, standing there
cursing in the impossible moonlight. None
90
of us were talking. I was angry too
because Japhy and Morley were afraid to stop and rest, they said it
was dangerous at this point to stop.
"What's the difference the
moon's shining, we can even
sleep."
"No, we've got to get down
to that car tonight."
"Well
let's stop a minute here. My legs can't take it."
"Okay,
only a minute."
But they
never rested long enough to suit me and it seemed to me they were getting
hysterical. I even began to curse them and at one point I even gave Japhy hell:
"What's the sense of killing yourself
like this, you call this fun? Phooey." (Your ideas are a crock, I
added to myself.) A little weariness'll change a lot of things. Eternities of
moonlight rock and thickets and boulders
and ducks and that horrifying valley with the two rim walls and finally
it seemed we were almost out of there, but nope, not quite yet, and my legs
screaming to stop, and me cursing and smashing at twigs and throwing myself on the ground to rest a minute.
"Come on Ray, everything
comes to an end." In fact I realized I had no guts anyway, which I've long
known. But I have joy. When we got to the alpine meadow I stretched out on my
belly and drank water and enjoyed myself peacefully in silence while they
talked and worried about getting down the
rest of the trail in time.
"Ah don't worry, it's a
beautiful night, you've driven yourself too hard. Drink some water and lie down
here for about five even ten minutes, everything takes care of itself."
Now I was being the philosopher. In fact Japhy agreed with me and we rested peacefully. That good long rest
assured my bones I could make it
down to the lake okay. It was beautiful
91
going down the trail. The moonlight poured through thick
foliage and made dapples on the backs of Morley and Japhy as they walked in
front of me. With our packs we got into a good rhythmic walk and enjoying going
"Hup hup" as we came to
switchbacks and swiveled around, always down, down, the pleasant downgoing swinging rhythm trail. And
that roaring creek was a beauty by moonlight, those flashes of flying moon water, that snow white foam, those
black-as-pitch trees, regular elfin
paradises of shadow and moon. The air began to get warmer and nicer and
in fact I thought I could begin to smell people again. We could smell the nice
raunchy tide-smell of the lake water, and
flowers, and softer dust of down below. Everything up there had smelled
of ice and snow and heartless spine rock. Here there was the smell of
sun-heated wood, sunny dust resting in the
moonlight, lake mud, flowers, straw, all those good things of the earth.
The trail was fun coming down and yet at
one point I was as tired as ever, more than in that endless valley of
boulders, but you could see the lake lodge down below now, a sweet little lamp
of light and so it didn't matter. Morley and Japhy were talking a blue streak
and all we had to do was roll on down to the car. In fact suddenly, as in a
happy dream, with the suddenness of waking
up from an endless nightmare and it's all over, we were striding across the road and there were houses and
there were automobiles parked under trees and Morley's car was sitting right there.
"From what I can tell by
feeling this air," said Morley, leaning on the car as we slung our packs
to the ground, "it mustn't have froze at all last night, I went back and
drained the crankcase for nothing."
"Well maybe it did freeze." Morley went over
and got mo-
92
tor oil at the lodge store and they told him it hadn't been
freezing at all, but one of the warmest
nights of the year.
"All that mad trouble for nothing," I said. But
we didn't care. We were famished. I said
"Let's go to Bridgeport and go
in one of those lunchcarts there boy and eat hamburg and potatoes and hot coffee." We drove down the
lakeside dirt road in the moonlight,
stopped at the inn where Morley returned the blankets, and drove on
into the little town and parked oh the highway. Poor Japhy, it was here finally
I found out his Achilles heel. This little
tough guy who wasn't afraid of
anything and could ramble around mountains for weeks alone and run down
mountains, was afraid of going into a
restaurant because the people in it were too well dressed. Morley and I laughed and said "What's the
difference? We'll just go in and
eat." But Japhy thought the place I chose looked too bourgeois and insisted on going to a more
workingman-looking restaurant across
the highway. We went in there and it was
a desultory place with lazy waitresses letting us sit there five minutes without even bringing a menu. I got
mad and said "Let's go to that
other place. What you afraid of, Japhy, what's the difference? You may know all about mountains but I know about where to eat." In fact we
got a little miffed at each other and
I felt bad. But he came to the other place, which was the better restaurant of the two, with a bar on one side,
many hunters drinking in the dim cocktail-lounge light, and the
restaurant itself a long counter and a lot of tables with whole gay families eating from a very considerable selection. The
menu was huge and good: mountain trout and everything. Japhy, I found, was also afraid of spending ten cents more for a good dinner. I went to the bar and
bought a glass of port and brought it
to our stool seats at the counter (Japhy:
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"You sure you can do that?")
and I kidded Japhy awhile. He felt better now. "That's what's the trouble with you Japhy, you're just an old anarchist scared of society.
What difference does it make?
Comparisons are odious."
"Well
Smith it just looked to me like this place was full of old rich
farts and the prices would be too high, I admit it, I'm scared of
all this American wealth, I'm just an old bhikku and I got
nothin to do with all this high standard of living, goddammit, I've
been a poor guy all my life and I can't get used to some things."
"Well
your weaknesses are admirable. I'll buy 'em." And we had a
raving great dinner of baked potatoes and porkchops and salad
and hot buns and blueberry pie and the works. We were so honestly hungry it wasn't
funny and it was honest. After dinner we went into a liquor store where I bought a bottle of muscatel and the old proprietor and his
old fat buddy looked at us and said
"Where you boys been?"
"Climbin
Matterhorn out there," I said proudly. They only stared at
us, gaping. But I felt great and bought a cigar and lit up and said "Twelve
thousand feet and we come down outa there
with such an appetite and feelin so good that now this wine is gonna hit
us just right." The old men gaped. We
were all sunburned and dirty and wildlooking, too. They didn't say anything. They thought we were crazy.
We got in
the car and drove back to San Francisco drinking and laughing and telling long
stories and Morley really drove beautifully that night and wheeled us silently through the graying dawn streets of Berkeley as Japhy and I
slept dead to the world in the seats. At some point or other I woke up like a little child and was told I was home and staggered
out of the car and went across the
grass into the cottage and opened my
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blankets and curled up and slept till late the next
afternoon a completely dreamless beautiful sleep. When I woke up the next day
the veins in my feet were all cleared. I had worked the blood clots right out of existence. I felt very happy.
When I got
up the next day I couldn't help smiling thinking of Japhy standing huddled in the night outside the
fancy restaurant wondering if we would be let in or not. It was the first time I'd ever seen him afraid of
anything. I planned to tell him
about such things, that night, when he'd be coming over. But that night
everything happened. First, Alvah left and went out for a few hours and I was
alone reading when suddenly I heard a bike in the yard and I looked and it was
Princess.
"Where's
everybody?" says she.
"How long can you
stay?"
"I've got to go right away,
unless I call my mother."
"Let's
call."
"Okay."
We went
down to the corner gas station pay phone, and she said she'd
be home in two hours, and as we walked back along the sidewalk I put my arm around
her waist but way around with my fingers
digging into her belly and she said "Oooh, I
95
can't stand that!" and almost fell down on the
sidewalk and bit my shirt just as an old
woman was coming our way ogling us angrily and after she passed us we
clinched in a big mad passionate kiss under the trees of evening. We rushed to
the cottage where she spent an hour
literally spinning in my arms and
Alvah walked in right in the middle of our final ministrations of the
Bodhisattva. We took our usual bath together. It was great sitting in the hot
tub chatting and soaping each other's backs. Poor Princess, she meant every
word she said. I really felt good about her, and compassionate, and even warned
her: "Now don't go wild and get into orgies with fifteen guys on a mountaintop."
Japhy came after she left, and then
Coughlin came and suddenly
(we had wine) a mad party began in the cottage. It started off with Coughlin and me, drunk now, walking arm in arm
down the main drag of town carrying huge, almost impossibly huge flowers of
some kind we'd found in a garden, and a new jug of wine, shouting haikus and
hoos and satoris at everybody we saw in the
street and everybody was smiling at
us. "Walked five miles carrying huge flower," yelled Coughlin, and I liked him now, he was deceptively
scholarly looking or fatty-boomboom looking but he was a real man. We
went to visit some professor of the English
Department at U. of Cal. we knew and
Coughlin left his shoes on the lawn and danced right into the astonished
professor's house, in fact frightened him
somewhat, though Coughlin was a fairly well known poet by now. Then
barefooted with our huge flowers and jugs we went back to the cottage it was
now about ten. I had just gotten some money
in the mail that day, a fellowship of three hundred bucks, so I said to
Japhy "Well I've learned everything now, I'm ready. How about driving me
to Oakland
96
tomorrow and helping me buy all my rucksack and gear and
stuff so I can take off for the desert?"
"Good, I'll get Morley's car
and be over to get you first thing in the morning, but right now how about some
of that wine?" I turned on the little red bandana dimbulb and we poured
wine and all sat around talking. It was a great night of talk. First Japhy started telling his later life story, like when he
was a merchant seaman in New York port and went around with a dagger on his hip, 1948, which surprised
Alvah and me, and then about the girl
he was in love with who lived in California: "I had a hardon for
her three thousand miles long, goodness!"
Then Coughlin said "Tell 'em about Great Plum,
Japh."
Instantly Japhy said "Great
Plum Zen Master was asked what the great meaning of Buddhism was, and he said
rush flowers, willow catkins, bamboo
needles, linen thread, in other words hang on boy, the ecstasy's
general, 's what he means, ecstasy of the mind, the world is nothing but mind
and what is the mind? The mind is nothing
but the world, goddammit. Then Horse Ancestor said 'This mind is
Buddha.' He also said 'No mind is Buddha.' Then finally talking about Great
Plum his boy, 'The plum is ripe.' "
"Well that's pretty interesting,"
said Alvah, "but Ou sont les neiges
d'antan?"
"Well I sort of agree with
you because the trouble is these people saw
the flowers like they were in a dream but dammit-all the world is real Smith and Goldbook and everybody carries
on like it was a dream, shit, like they were themselves dreams or dots. Pain or love or danger makes you real again, ain't that right Ray like when you were scared on
that ledge?"
"Everything was real, okay."
97
"That's why frontiersmen are
always heroes and were alii ways my real heroes and will always be. They're
constantly on the alert in the realness
which might as well be real as unreal,
what difference does it make, Diamond Sutra says 'Make no formed
conceptions about the realness of existence nor about the unrealness of existence," or words like that. Handcuffs
will get soft and billy clubs will topple over, let's go on being free anyhow."
"The
President of the United States suddenly grows crosseyed and
floats away!" I yell.
"And
anchovies will turn to dust!" yells Coughlin.
"The Golden Gate is creaking
with sunset rust," says Alvah.
"And
anchovies will turn to dust," insists Coughlin.
"Give me another slug of
that jug. How! Ho! Hoo!" Japhy leaping
up: "I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and
horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard,
the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths,
see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums
refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and
therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they
didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new
fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of
work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a
great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans
wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains
to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls
happy and old girls happier, all of 'em
98
Zen Lunatics who go about writing
poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving
visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures,
that's what I like about you Goldbook and Smith, you two guys from the East Coast which I thought was dead." "We
thought the West Coast was dead!" "You've
really brought a fresh wind around here. Why, do you realize the
Jurassic pure granite of Sierra Nevada with the straggling high conifers of the
last ice age and lakes we just saw is one of the greatest expressions on this
earth, just think how truly great and wise America will be, with all this energy and exuberance and space focused into the
Dharma." "Oh"—Alvah—"balls
on that old tired Dharma." "Ho! What we need is a floating zendo, where an old Bodhisattva can
wander from place to place and always be sure
to find a spot to sleep in among friends and cook up mush." "
'The boys was glad, and rested up for more, and Jack cooked mush, in honor of
the door,'" I recited. "What's that?"
"That's a poem I wrote. 'The
boys was sittin in a grove of trees, listenin to Buddy explain the keys. Boys,
sez he, the Dharma is a door . . . Let's see ...
Boys, I say the keys, cause there's lotsa keys, but only one door, one hive for
the bees. So listen to me, and I'll try to tell all, as I heard it long ago, in
the Pure Land Hall. For you good boys, with wine-soaked teeth, that can't
understand these words on a heath, I'll make
it simpler, like a bottle of wine, and a good woodfire, under stars
divine. Now listen to me, and when you have learned
the Dharma of the Buddhas of old and yearned, to sit down with the truth, under a lonesome tree, in
Yuma Arizony,
99
or anywhere you be, don't thank me for tellin, what was
told me, this is the wheel I'm a-turnin,
this is the reason I be: Mind is the
Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.'
"
"Ah but that's too
pessimistic and like dream gucky," says Alvah,
"though the rhyme is pure like Melville."
"We'll have a floatin zendo
for Buddy's winesoaked boys to come and lay up in and learn to drink tea like
Ray did, learn to meditate like you should Alvah, and I'll be a head monk of a
zendo with a big jar full of crickets."
"Crickets?"
"Yessir, that's what, a
series of monasteries for fellows to go and
monastate and meditate in, we can have groups of shacks up in the Sierras or the High Cascades or even
Ray says down in Mexico and have big
wild gangs of pure holy men getting together
to drink and talk and pray, think of the waves of salvation can flow out of nights like that, and
finally have women, too, wives,
small huts with religious families, like the old days of the Puritans.
Who's to say the cops of America and the Republicans
and Democrats are gonna tell everybody what to do?"
"What's the crickets?"
"Big jar full of crickets,
give me another drink Coughlin, about one tenth of an inch long with huge white
antennae and hatch 'em myself, little
sentient beings in a bottle that sing real
good when they grow up. I wanta swim in rivers and drink goatmilk and
talk with priests and just read Chinese books and amble around the valleys
talking to farmers and their children. We've got to have mind-collecting weeks
in our zendos where your mind tries to fly
off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together
with your eyes
100
closed except of course the whole thing
is wrong. D'y'hear my latest poem Goldbook?"
"No what?"
"Mother
of children, sister, daughter of sick old man, virgin your blouse is torn, hungry and
barelegged, I'm hungry too, take these
poems."
"Fine, fine."
"I
wanta bicycle in hot afternoon heat, wear Pakistan leather sandals,
shout in high voice at Zen monk buddies standing in thin hemp summer robes and
stubble heads, wanta live in golden pavilion temples, drink beer, say goodbye,
go Yokahama big buzz Asia port full of vassals and vessels, hope, work around, come back, go, go to Japan, come back
to U.S.A., read Hakuin, grit my teeth and discipline myself all the time
while getting nowhere and thereby learn . . . learn that my body and everything gets tired and ill and droopy
and so find out all about Hakuyu."
"Who's Hakuyu?"
"His
name meant White Obscurity, his name meant he who lived in the hills back of
Northern-White-Water where I'm gonna go
hiking, by God, it must be full of steep piney gorges and bamboo valleys and
little cliffs."
"I'll
go with you!" (me).
"I wanta read about Hakuin,
who went to see this old man who lived in a
cave, slept with deer and ate chestnuts and the old man told him to quit
meditating and quit thinking about koans, as Ray says, and instead learn how to
go to sleep and wake up, said, when you go
to sleep you should put your legs together and take deep breaths and
then concentrate your mind on a spot one and a half inches below your navel
until you feel it get like a ball of power and then start breathing
101
from your heels clear up and concentrate saying to yourself that that center just here is Amida's Pure
Land, the center of the mind, and when you wake up you should start by consciously breathing and stretching a little and
thinking the same thoughts, see, the
rest of the time."
"That's
what I like, see," says Alvah, "these actual signposts to
something. What else?"
"The rest of the time he
said don't bother about thinkin about
nothin, just eat well, not too much, and sleep good, and old Hakuyu said he was three hundred friggin years
old just then and figured he was good
for five hundred more, by Gawd which
makes me think he must still be up there if he's anybody at all."
"Or the sheepherder kicked his dog!" puts in
Coughlin.
"I bet I can find that cave in Japan."
"You
can't live in this world but there's nowhere else to go," laughs
Coughlin.
"What's
that mean?" I ask.
"It means the chair I sit in
is a lion throne and the lion is walking,
he roars."
"What's he say?"
"Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face
of Glory! Universe chawed and
swallowed!"
"Ah balls! "I yell.
"I'm goin to Marin County in
a few weeks," said Japhy, "go walk a hunnerd times around Tamalpais
and help purify the atmosphere and accustom
the local spirits to the sound of sutra. What you think, Alvah?"
"I think it's all lovely hallucination but I love
it sorta."
"Alvah,
trouble with you is you don't do plenty night zazen especially when it's cold out,
that's best, besides you should
102
get married and have halfbreed babies, manuscripts, homespun
blankets and mother's milk on your happy ragged mat floor like this one. Get
yourself a hut house not too far from town, live cheap, go ball in the bars
once in a while, write and rumble in the hills and learn how to saw boards and
talk to grandmas you damn fool, carry loads of wood for them, clap your hands at shrines, get supernatural
favors, take flower-arrangement
lessons and grow chrysanthemums by the door, and get married for
krissakes, get a friendly smart sensitive human-being
gal who don't give a shit for martinis every night and all that dumb
white machinery in the kitchen." "Oh,"
says Alvah sitting up glad, "and what else?" "Think of barn swallows and nighthawks
filling the fields. Do you know, say Ray, since yesterday I translated
another stanza of Han Shan, lissen, 'Cold
Mountain is a house, without beams or walls, the six doors left and
right are open, the hall is the blue sky,
the rooms are vacant and empty, the east wall strikes the west wall, at
the center not one thing. Borrowers don't trouble me, in the cold I build a
little fire, when I'm hungry I boil up some greens, I've got no use for the
kulak with his big barn and pasture ...
he just sets up a prison for himself, once
in, he can't get out, think it over, it might happen to you.' "
Then Japhy picked up his guitar
and got going on songs; finally I took the guitar and made up a song as I went
along plucking on the strings any old way, actually drumming on them with my fingertips, drum drum drum, and sang
the song of the Midnight Ghost freight train. "That's about the midnight ghost in California but you know what it
made me think of Smith? Hot, very hot, bamboo growing up to forty feet
out thar and whipping around in the breeze and hot and a
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bunch of monks are making a racket on their flutes somewhere
and when they recite sutras with a steady Kwakiutl dance drumbeat and riffs on the bells and sticks it's something to
hear like a big prehistoric coyote chanting. . . . Things tucked away in all
you mad guys like that go back to the days when men married bears and talked to
the buffalo by Gawd. Give me another drink.
Keep your socks darned, boys, and
your boots greased."
But as though that wasn't enough
Coughlin says quite calmly crosslegged "Sharpen your pencils, straighten
your ties, shine your shoes and button your
flies, brush your teeth, comb your
hair, sweep the floor, eat blueberry pies, open your eyes . . ."
"Eat blueberry spies is
good," says Alvah fingering his lip seriously.
"Remembering
all the while that I have tried very hard, but the rhododendron tree is only half enlightened, and ants
and bees are communists and trolley cars are bored."
"And little Japanese boys in
the F train sing Inky Dinky Parly Voo!" I yell.
"And the mountains live in
total ignorance so I don't give up, take
off your shoes and put 'em in your pocket. Now I've answered all your questions, too bad, give me a
drink, mauvais sujet."
"Don't step on the ballsucker!" I yell drunk.
"Try to do it without
stepping on the aardvark," says Coughlin. "Don't be a sucker all your
life, dummy up, ya dope. Do you see what I mean? My lion is fed, I sleep at his
side."
"Oh,"
says Alvah, "I wish I could take all this down." And I was amazed, pretty amazed, by
the fast wonderful yak yak
104
yak darts in my sleeping brain. We all
got dizzy and drunk. It was a mad night. It ended up with Coughlin
and me wrestling and
making holes in the wall and almost knocking the little cottage down: Alvah was
pretty mad the next day. During the wrestling match I practically broke poor
Coughlin's leg; myself, I got a bad
splinter of wood stuck an inch up into my skin and it didn't come out till almost a year later. Meanwhile, at
some point, Morley appeared in the doorway like a ghost carrying two quarts of
yogurt and wanting to know if we wanted some. Japhy left at about two a.m.
saying he'd come back and get me in the
morning for our big day outfitting me with full pack. Everything was
fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But
there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see
if you take a walk some night on a
suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each
with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each
living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking
at you because you pass on human feet
instead of on wheels. You'll see what I
mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the
Zen Lunatics have long joined dust,
laughter on their dust lips. Only one thing I'll say for the people
watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not
hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was
Japhy. ... I see him in future years
stalking along with full rucksack, in
suburban streets, passing the blue television windows of homes, alone,
his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified
to the Master Switch. As for me, maybe the answer was in my little Buddy
poem that kept on: " 'Who played
105
this cruel joke, on bloke after bloke, packing like a rat, across the desert flat?' asked Montana Slim,
gesturing to him, the buddy of the men, in this lion's den. 'Was it God got
mad, like the Indian cad, who was only a giver, crooked like the river?
Gave you a garden, let it all harden, then comes the flood, and the loss of your blood? Pray tell us, good buddy, and don't
make it muddy, who played this trick, on Harry and Dick, and why is so mean,
this Eternal Scene, just what's the point,
of this whole joint?' " I thought maybe I could find out at last
from these Dharma Bums.
But I had my own little bangtail
ideas and they had nothing to do with the "lunatic" part of all this.
I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular
kitchen and bedroom right on my back,
and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the
perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely
neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living
creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To
be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack,
and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese
call
106
"do-nothing." I didn't want to have anything to
do, really, either with Japhy's ideas about
society (I figured it would be better just to avoid it altogether, walk
around it) or with any of Alvah's ideas
about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and
because you would be dead some day.
When Japhy came to get me the
following morning I had all this in mind.
He and I and Alvah drove to Oakland in Morley's car and went first to some
Goodwill stores and Salvation Army stores to buy various flannel shirts
(at fifty cents a crack) and undershirts.
We were all hung-up on colored undershirts, just a minute after walking
across the street in the clean morning sun Japhy'd said, "You know, the
earth is a fresh planet, why worry about
anything?" (which is true) now we
were foraging with bemused countenances among all kinds of dusty old bins filled with the washed and
mended shirts of all the old bums in the Skid Row universe. I bought
socks, one pair of long woolen Scotch socks that go way up over your knees,
which would be useful enough on a cold night meditating
in the frost. And I bought a nice little canvas jacket with zipper for ninety cents.
Then we drove to the huge Army
Navy store in Oakland and went way in the
back where sleeping bags were hanging from
hooks and all kinds of equipment, including Morley's famous air mattress, water cans, flashlights,
tents, rifles, canteens, rubber
boots, incredible doodas for hunters and fishermen, out of which Japhy
and I found a lot of useful little things for bhikkus. He bought an aluminum
pot holder and made me a gift of it; it never burns you, being aluminum, and
you just pluck your pots right out of a campfire
with it. He selected an excellent
duck-down used sleeping bag for me, zipping it open
107
and examining the inside. Then a
brand new rucksack, of which I was so proud. "I'll give you my own
old sleeping-bag cover," he said. Then I bought little plastic snow
glasses just for the hell of it, and railroad gloves, new ones. I
figured I had good enough boots back home east, where I was going for
Christmas, otherwise I would have bought a pair of Italian mountain
boots like Japhy had.
We drove from the Oakland store
to Berkeley again to the Ski Shop, where, as we walked in and the clerk came
over, Japhy said in his lumberjack voice "Outfittin me friends for the
Apocalypse." And he led me to the back of the store and picked out a
beautiful nylon poncho with hood, which you put over you and even over your
rucksack (making a huge hunchbacked monk)
and which completely protects you from
the rain. It can also be made into a pup tent, and can also be used as your sleeping mat under the sleeping
bag. I bought a polybdenum bottle,
with screw top, which could be used (I said
to myself) to carry honey up to the mountains. But I later used it as a
canteen for wine more than anything else, and later
when I made some money as a canteen for whisky. I also bought a plastic
shaker which came in very handy, just a tablespoon
of powdered milk and a little creek water and you shake yourself up a
glass of milk. I bought a whole bunch of food
wraps like Japhy's. I was all outfitted for the Apocalypse indeed, no
joke about that; if an atom bomb should have hit San Francisco that night all
I'd have to do is hike on out of there, if
possible, and with my dried foods all packed tight and my bedroom and
kitchen on my head, no trouble in the world. The final big purchases were my
cookpots, two large pots fitting into each
other, with a handled cover that was also the frying pan, and tin cups, and small fitted-together cutlery
108
in aluminum. Japhy made me another present from his own
pack, a regular tablespoon, but he took out his pliers and twisted the handle
up back and said "See, when you wanta pluck a pot out of a big fire, just
go flup." I felt like a new man.
I put on my new flannel shirt and
new socks and underwear and my jeans and packed the rucksack tight and slung it on and went to San Francisco that night
just to get the feel of walking around the city night with it on my
back. I walked down Mission Street singing merrily. I went to Skid Row Third
Street to enjoy my favorite fresh doughnuts and coffee and the bums in there
were all fascinated and wanted to know if I
was going uranium hunting. I didn't want to start making speeches about
what I was going to hunt for was infinitely
more valuable to mankind in the long run than ore, but let them tell me:
"Boy, all you gotta do is go to that Colorady country and take off with
your pack there and a nice little Geiger
counter and you'll be a millionaire." Everybody in Skid Row wants
to be a millionaire. "Okay boys,"
I said, "mebbe I'll do that." "Lotsa uranium up in the Yukon country
too." "And down in
Chihuahua," said an old man. "Bet any dough thar's uranium in Chihuahua." .
109
I went out of there and walked
around San Francisco with my huge pack, happy. I went over to Rosie's place to
see Cody and Rosie. I was amazed to see her, she'd changed so suddenly, she was
suddenly skinny and a skeleton and her eyes were huge with terror and popping
out of her face. "What's the matter?"
Cody drew me into the other room
and didn't want me to talk to her. "She's got like this in the last
forty-eight hours," he whispered.
"What's the matter with
her?"
"She says she wrote out a
list of all our names and all our sins, she says, and then tried to flush them
down the toilet where she works, and the long list of paper stuck in the toilet
and they had to send for some sanitation character to clean up the mess and she
claims he wore a uniform and was a cop and took it with him to the police
station and we're all going to be arrested. She's just nuts, that's all."
Cody was my old buddy who'd let me live in his attic in San Francisco years
ago, an old trusted friend. "And did you see the marks on her arms?"
"Yes." I had seen her
arms, which were all cut up.
"She tried to slash her
wrists with some old knife that doesn't cut right. I'm worried about her. Will
you watch her while I go to work tonight?"
"Oh man—"
"Oh you, oh man, don't be
like that. You know what it says in the Bible, 'even unto the least of these .
. .'"
"All right but I was
planning on having fun tonight."
"Fun isn't everything.
You've got some responsibilities sometimes, you know."
I didn't have a chance to show
off my new pack in The
110
Place. He drove me to the cafeteria
on Van Ness where I got Rosie a bunch of sandwiches with his money
and I went back alone and tried to make her eat. She sat in the kitchen
staring at me.
"But
you don't realize what this means!" she kept saying. "Now
they know everything about you."
"Who?"
"You."
"Me?"
"You,
and Alvah, and Cody, and that Japhy Ryder, all of you, and
me. Everybody that hangs around The Place. We're all going to be arrested tomorrow if
not sooner." She looked at the door in sheer terror.
"Why'd you try to cut your
arms like that? Isn't that a mean thing to
do to yourself?"
"Because
I don't want to live. I'm telling you there's going to be a big
new revolution of police now."
"No, there's going to be a
rucksack revolution," I said laughing,
not realizing how serious the situation was; in fact Cody and I had no sense, we should have known
from her arms how far she wanted to
go. "Listen to me," I began, but she wouldn't listen.
"Don't you realize what's
happening?" she yelled staring at me with big wide sincere eyes trying by
crazy telepathy to make me believe that
what she was saying was absolutely true. She stood there in the
kitchen of the little apartment with her skeletal hands held out in
supplicatory explanation, her legs braced, her red hair all frizzly, trembling
and shuddering and grabbing her face from time to time.
"It's nothing but
bullshit!" I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I
tried to explain the Dharma
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to people, Alvah, my mother, my
relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened, they always
wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn't know anything, I was just a dumb
young kid and impractical fool who didn't understand the serious significance of this very important, very
real world.
"The police are going to
swoop down and arrest us all and not only that but we're all going to be
questioned for weeks and weeks and maybe even years till they find out all the crimes and sins that have been committed,
it's a network, it runs in every direction, finally they'll arrest
everybody in North Beach and even everybody in Greenwich Village and then Paris and then finally they'll have everybody
in jail, you don't know, it's only the beginning." She kept
jumping at sounds in the hall, thinking the cops were coming.
"Why don't you listen to
me?" I kept pleading, but each time I said that, she hypnotized me with
her staring eyes and almost had me for a
while believing in what she believed from the sheer weight of her complete
dedication to the discriminations her mind was making. "But you're
getting these silly convictions and
conceptions out of nowhere, don't you realize all this life is just a dream? Why don't you just relax and enjoy
God? God is you, you fool!"
"Oh,
they're going to destroy you, Ray, I can see it, they're going to
fetch all the religious squares too and fix them good. It's only begun. It's all tied in
with Russia though they won't say it ...
and there's something I heard about the sun's rays and something about what
happens while we're all asleep. Oh Ray the
world will never be the same!"
"What world? What difference
does it make? Please stop, you're scaring me. By God in fact you're not scaring
me and I won't listen to another word." I went out, angry, bought
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some wine and ran into Cowboy and some other musicians and
ran back with the gang to watch her. "Have some wine, put some wisdom in your head."
"No, I'm laying off the lush,
all that wine you drink is rot-gut, it burns
your stomach out, it makes your brain dull. I can tell there's something
wrong with you, you're not sensitive, you don't realize what's going
on!"
"Oh come on."
"This
is my last night on earth," she added.
The musicians and I drank up all the wine and talked, till
about midnight, and Rosie seemed to be all right now, lying on the couch,
talking, even laughing a bit, eating her sandwiches and drinking some tea I'd
brewed her. The musicians left and I slept on the kitchen floor in my new
sleeping bag. But when Cody came home that night and I was gone she went up on
the roof while he was asleep and broke the skylight to get jagged bits of glass
to cut her wrists, and was sitting there bleeding at dawn when a neighbor saw
her and sent for the cops and when the cops ran out on the roof to help her that was it: she saw the great cops
who were going to arrest us all and made a run for the roof edge. The
young Irish cop made a flying tackle and just got a hold of her bathrobe but
she fell out of it and fell naked to the sidewalk six flights below. The
musicians, who lived downstairs in a basement pad, and had been up all night
talking and playing records, heard the thud. They looked out the basement window
and saw that horrible sight. "Man it broke us up, we couldn't make the gig
that night." They drew the shades and trembled. Cody was asleep. . . .
When I heard about it the next day, when I saw the picture in the paper showing
an X on the sidewalk where she had landed,
one of my thoughts
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was: "And if she had only listened to me ... Was I talking so dumb after all? Are my ideas about what to do so silly and stupid and
childlike? Isn't this the time now to start following what I know to be
true?"
And that
had done it. The following week I packed up and decided to hit the road and get out of that city of
ignorance which is the modern city. I said goodbye to Japhy and the others and
hopped my freight back down the Coast to L.A. Poor
Rosie—she had been absolutely certain that the world was real and
fear was real and now what was real? "At least," I thought, "she's in Heaven now, and she
knows."
And that's what I said to myself,
"I am now on the road to Heaven."
Suddenly it became clear to me that there was a lot of teaching for me
to do in my lifetime. As I say, I saw Japhy
before I left, we wandered sadly to the Chinatown park, had a dinner in Nam Yuen's, came out, sat
in the Sunday morning grass and suddenly here was this group of Negro preachers standing in the grass preaching to
desultory groups of uninterested Chinese families letting their kiddies romp in
the grass and to bums who cared just
a little bit more. A big fat woman
like Ma Rainey was standing there with her legs outspread howling out a tremendous sermon in a
booming voice
114
that kept breaking from speech to
blues-singing music, beautiful, and the reason why this woman, who was such a great preacher, was not preaching in a church was
because every now and then she just
simply had to go sploosh and spit as hard as she could off to the side in the grass, "And I'm
tellin you, the Lawd will take care of you if you re-cognize that you
have a new field . . . Yes!"—and sploosh, she turns and spits about ten feet
away a great sploosh of spit. "See," I told Japhy, "she couldn't
do that in a church, that's her flaw as a preacher as far as the churches are concerned but boy have you ever heard
a greater preacher?"
"Yeah," says Japhy.
"But I don't like all that Jesus stuff she's
talking about."
"What's wrong with Jesus?
Didn't Jesus speak of Heaven? Isn't Heaven
Buddha's nirvana?"
"According to your own interpretation, Smith."
"Japhy, there were things I
wanted to tell Rosie and I felt suppressed
by this schism we have about separating Buddhism from Christianity, East
from West, what the hell difference does it
make? We're all in Heaven now, ain't we?"
"Who said so?"
"Is this nirvana we're in now or ain't it?"
"It's both nirvana and samsara we're in now."
"Words, words, what's in a
word? Nirvana by any other name. Besides
don't you hear that big old gal calling you and telling you you've got a new
field, a new Buddha-field boy?" Japhy was so pleased he wrinkled his eyes and smiled. "Whole Buddha-fields in every direction for each one of
us, and Rosie was a flower we let wither."
"Never
spoke more truly, Ray."
The
big old gal came up to us, too, noticing us, especially
115
me. She called me darling, in fact. "I kin see from
your eyes that you understand ever word I'm sayin, darling. I want you to know that I want you to go to Heaven and be
happy. I want you to understand ever
word I'm sayin."
"I hear and understand."
Across the
street was the new Buddhist temple some young Chamber of Commerce Chinatown Chinese were trying to build, by themselves, one night I'd come by there
and, drunk, pitched in with them with a wheelbarrow hauling sand from outside in, they were young Sinclair Lewis
idealistic forward-looking kids who
lived in nice homes but put on jeans to come down and work on the church, like you might expect in some midwest town some midwest lads with a
bright-faced Richard Nixon leader, the prairie all around. Here in the
heart of the tremendously sophisticated little city called San Francisco
Chinatown they were doing the same thing but their church was the church of Buddha. Strangely Japhy wasn't
interested in the Buddhism of San Francisco Chinatown because it was traditional Buddhism, not the Zen intellectual
artistic Buddhism he loved—but I was trying to make him see that
everything was the same. In the restaurant we'd eaten with chopsticks and enjoyed it. Now he was saying goodbye to me
and I didn't know when I'd see him
again.
Behind the colored woman was a man preacher who kept
rocking with his eyes closed saying "That's right." She said to us
"Bless both you boys for listenin to what I have to say. Remember that we
know that all things woik together for good to them that loves God, to
them who are the called accordin to His purpose. Romans eight
eighteen, younguns. And there's a new field a-waitin for ya, and be sure
you live up to every one of your obligations. Hear now?"
116
"Yes, ma'am, be seein ya." I said goodbye to
Japhy.
I spent a few days with Cody's
family in the hills. He was tremendously sad
about Rosie's suicide and kept saying he had to pray for her night and day at this particular crucial moment when because she was a suicide her soul was still
flitting around the surface of the earth ready for either purgatory or
hell. "We got to get her in purgatory, man." So I helped him pray
when I slept on his lawn at night in my new sleeping bag. During the days I
took down the little poems his children recited to me, in my little
breastpocket notebooks. Yoo hoo . . . yoo hoo ...
I come to you . . . Boo hoo . . . boo hoo ...
I love you . . . Bloo bloo . . . the sky is blue . . . I'm higher than you . .
. boo hoo . . . boo hoo. Meanwhile Cody was
saying "Don't drink so much of that old wine."
Late Monday afternoon I was at
the San Jose yards and waited for the afternoon Zipper due in at four-thirty.
It was its day off so I had to wait for the Midnight Ghost due in at
seven-thirty. Meanwhile as soon as it got dark I cooked my can of macaroni on a little Indian fire of twigs
among the deep dense weeds by the
track, and ate. The Ghost was coming in. A friendly switchman told me
I'd better not try to get on it as there was a yard bull at the crossing with a
big flashlight who would see if anybody was riding away on it and would phone
ahead of Watsonville to have them thrown off. "Now that it's winter the
boys have been breaking into the sealed trucks
and breaking windows and leaving bottles on the floor, wreckin that train."
I sneaked
down to the east end of the yard with heavy pack slung on, and caught the Ghost as she was coming out,
beyond the bull's crossing, and opened the sleeping bag and took my shoes off, put them under my wrapped-up
balled-up
117
coat and slipped in and slept
beautiful joyous sleep all the way ; to Watsonville where I hid by the weeds
till highball, got on again, and slept then all night long flying down the
unbelievable coast and O Buddha thy moonlight O Christ thy starling on
the
sea, the sea, Surf, Tangair, Gaviota, the train going eighty miles an
hour and me warm as toast in my sleeping bag flying ; down and
going home for Christmas. In fact I only woke up rat about seven o'clock in the morning
when the train was slow-Ing down into the L.A. yards and the first
thing I saw, as I was putting my shoes on and getting my stuff ready to
jump off, was a yard worker waving at me and yelling "Welcome to
L.A.!"
But I was bound to get out of
there fast. The smog was heavy, my eyes were
weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.
And I had caught a cold from Cody's kids
and had that old California virus and felt miserable now. With the water dripping out of reefer refrigerators I gathered up palmfuls and splashed it in my
face and washed and washed my teeth
and combed my hair and walked into
L.A. to wait until seven-thirty in the evening when I planned to catch the Zipper firstclass freight to.
Yuma Arizona. it was a horrible day waiting. I drank coffee in Skid Row coffee houses, South Main Street, coffee-and, seventeen
cents.
At
nightfall I was lurking around waiting for my train. A bum was sitting in a doorway
watching me with peculiar Interest. I went over to talk to him. He said he was
an ex-Marine from Paterson New Jersey and after a while he whipped out a little slip of paper he read
sometimes on freight trains. I looked at it. It was a quotation from the Digha
Nikaya, the words of Buddha. I
smiled; I didn't say anything. He was a great voluble bum, and a bum who didn't drink, he was an
118
idealistic hobo and said "That's all there is to it,
that's what I like to do, I'd rather hop
freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood
fires, than be rich and have a home or work. I'm satisfied. I used to have
arthritis, you know, I was in the hospital for years. I found out a way to cure
it and then I hit the road and I been on it ever since."
"How'd you cure your
arthritis? I got thrombophlebitis myself."
"You do? Well this'll work
for you too. Just stand on your head three
minutes a day, or mebbe five minutes. Every morning when I get up
whether it's in a riverbottom or right on a train that's rollin along, I put a
little mat on the floor and I stand on my head and count to five hundred,
that's about three minutes isn't it?"
He was very concerned about whether counting up to five hundred made it three
minutes. That was strange. I figured he was worried about his arithmetic record
in school.
"Yeah,
about that."
"Just
do that every day and your phlebitis will go away like my arthritis did. I'm forty, you
know. Also, before you go to bed at night,
have hot milk and honey, I always have a little jar of honey" (he
fished one out from his pack) "and I put the milk in a can and the honey, and heat it over the fire, and drink it.
Just those two things."
"Okay."
I vowed to take his advice because he was Buddha. The result was that in about
three months my phlebitis disappeared
completely, and didn't show up ever again, which is amazing. In fact since that
time I've tried to tell doctors about this
but they seem to think I'm crazy. Dharma Bum, Dharma Bum. I'll never
forget that intelligent Jewish ex-Marine bum from Paterson New Jersey, whoever
he was, with his little
119
slip of paper to read in the raw gon night by dripping
reefer platforms in the nowhere industrial
formations of an America that is
still magic America.
At seven-thirty my Zipper came in and
was being made up by
the switchmen and I hid in the weeds to catch it, hiding partly behind a telephone pole. It pulled out,
surprisingly fast I thought, and with my heavy fifty-pound rucksack I
ran out and trotted along till I saw an agreeable drawbar and took a hold of it
and hauled on and climbed straight to the top
of the box to have a good look at the whole train and see where my
flatcar'd be. Holy smokes goddamn and all ye falling candles of heaven smash,
but as the train picked up tremendous
momentum and tore out of that yard I saw it was a bloody no-good
eighteen-car sealed sonofabitch and at almost twenty miles an hour it was do
or die, get off or hang on to my life at
eighty miles per (impossible on a boxcar top) so I had to scramble down
the rungs again but first I had to untangle my strap clip from where it had got
caught in the catwalk on top so by the time
I was hanging from the lowest rung
and ready to drop off we were going too fast now. Slinging the rucksack
and holding it hard in one hand calmly and madly
I stepped off hoping for the best and turned everything away and only staggered a few feet and I was safe
on ground. But now I was three miles
into the industrial jungle of L.A. in
mad sick sniffling smog night and had to sleep all that night by a wire
fence in a ditch by the tracks being waked up all night by rackets of Southern
Pacific and Santa Fe switchers bellyaching around, till fog and clear of
midnight when I breathed better (thinking and praying in my sack) but then more
fog and smog again and horrible damp white cloud of dawn and my bag too hot to
sleep in and outside too raw to
120
stand, nothing but horror all night long, except at dawn
a little bird blessed me.
The only thing to do was to get
out of L.A. According to my friend's instructions I stood on my head, using the
wire fence to prevent me from falling over.
It made my cold feel a little better. Then I walked to the bus station
(through tracks and side streets) and
caught a cheap bus twenty-five miles to Riverside. Cops kept looking at me suspiciously with that big bag on my back. Everything was far away from the
easy purity of being with Japhy
Ryder in that high rock camp under peaceful singing stars.
It took exactly the entire
twenty-five miles to get out of the smog of Los Angeles; the sun was clear in
Riverside. I exulted to see a beautiful dry riverbottom with white sand and just a trickle river in the middle as we
rolled over the bridge into Riverside. I was looking for my first chance
to camp out for the night and try out my new ideas. But at the hot bus station a Negro saw me with my pack and
came over and said he was part Mohawk
and when I told him I was going back
up the road to sleep in that riverbottom he said "No sir, you can't do that, cops in this town are the toughest
in the state. If they see you down there they'll pull you in. Boy,"
said he, "I'd like to sleep outdoor too tonight but's against the
law."
121
"This
ain't India, is it," I said, sore, and walked off anyway to try it. It was just like the
cop in the San Jose yards, even though it was against the law and they were
trying to catch you the only thing to do was do it anyway and keep hidden. I
laughed thinking what would happen if I was Fuke the Chinese sage of the ninth
century who wandered around China constantly ringing his bell. The only
alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a
hundred other patients in front of
a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be "supervised." I went into a supermarket and bought some concentrated orange juice and nutted cream
cheese and whole wheat bread, which
would make nice meals till tomorrow, when I'd hitchhike on through the
other side of town. I saw many cop cruising
cars and they were looking at me suspiciously: sleek, well-paid cops in
brand-new cars with all that expensive
radio equipment to see that no bhikku slept in his grove tonight.
At the highway woods I took one
good look to make sure no cruisers were up or down the road and I dove right in
the woods. It was a lot of dry thickets I had to crash through, I didn't want
to bother finding the Boy Scout trail. I aimed straight for the golden sands of the riverbottom I could see up ahead. Over the thickets ran the highway bridge,
no one could see me unless they
stopped and got out to stare down. Like a criminal I crashed through
bright brittle thickets and came out sweating and stomped ankle deep in streams
and then when I found a nice opening in a
kind of bamboo grove I hesitated to light a fire till dusk when no
one'd see my small smoke, and make sure to keep it low embers. I spread my
poncho and sleeping bag out on some dry rackety grove-
122
bottom leaves and bamboo splitjoints.
Yellow aspens filled the afternoon air with gold smoke and made my eyes quiver. It was a
nice spot except for the roar of trucks on the river bridge. My head cold and
sinus were bad and I stood on my head five minutes. I laughed. "What would
people think if they saw me?" But it wasn't funny, I felt rather sad, in
fact real sad, like the night before in that horrible fog wire-fence country in
industrial L.A., when in fact I'd cried a little. After all a homeless man has
reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.
It got dark. I took my pot and
went to get water but had to scramble through so much underbrush that when I
got back to my camp most of the water had splashed out. I mixed it in my new plastic shaker with orange-juice
concentrate and shook up an ice-cold orange, then I spread nutted cream
cheese on the whole-wheat bread and ate content. "Tonight," I
thought, "I sleep tight and long and pray under the stars for the Lord to
bring me to Buddhahood after my Buddhawork is done, amen." And as it was Christmas, I added "Lord bless you all
and merry tender Christmas on all your rooftops and I hope angels squat
there the night of the big rich real Star, amen." And then I thought,
later, lying on my bag smoking, "Everything is possible. I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all
at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things. I have all the time in the
world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the
timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like
mind essence and the minds of banana peels" I added laughing remembering
my poetic Zen Lunatic Dharma Bum friends of San Francisco whom I was beginning
to miss now. And I added a little prayer for Rosie.
123
"If she'd lived, and could
have come here with me, maybe I could have told her something, made her feel
different. Maybe I'd just make love to her and say nothing."
I spent a long time meditating
crosslegged, but the truck growl bothered me. Soon the stars came out and my
little Indian fire sent up some smoke to them. I slipped in my bag at eleven
and slept well, except for the bamboo joints under the leaves that caused me to
turn over all night. "Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than
sleep in a comfortable bed unfree." I was making up all kinds of sayings
as I went along. I was started on my new life with my new equipment: a regular
Don Quixote of tenderness. In the morning I felt exhilarated and meditated
first thing and made up a little prayer: "I bless you, all living things,
I bless you in the endless past, I bless you in the endless present, I bless
you in the endless future, amen."
This little prayer made me feel
good and fool good as I packed up my things and took off to the tumbling water
that came down from a rock across the highway, delicious spring water to bathe
my face in and wash my teeth in and drink. Then I was ready for the
three-thousand-mile hitchhike to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where my mother
was waiting, probably washing the dishes in her dear pitiful kitchen.
124
The current song at that time was
Roy Hamilton singing "Everybody's Got
a Home but Me." I kept singing that as I swung along. On the other
side of Riverside I got on the highway and got a ride right away from a young
couple, to an airfield five miles out of
town, and from there a ride from a quiet
man almost to Beaumont, California, but five miles short of it on a
double-lane speed highway with nobody likely to stop so I hiked on in in
beautiful sparkling air. At Beaumont I ate hotdogs, hamburgers and a bag of
fries and added a big strawberry shake, all among giggling high-school
children. Then, the other side of town, I got a ride from a Mexican called
Jaimy who said he was the son of the governor of the state of Baja California, Mexico, which I didn't believe and was a
wino and had me buy him wine which he only threw up out the window as he drove:
a droopy, sad, helpless young man, very sad
eyes, very nice, a bit nutty. He was driving clear to Mexicali, a little
off my route but good enough and far enough
out toward Arizona to suit me.
At Calexico
it was Christmas shopping time on Main Street with incredible perfect
astonished Mexican beauties who kept getting so much better that when the
first ones had re-passed they'd already become capped and thin in my mind, I was
125
standing there looking
everywhichaway, eating an ice-cream cone, waiting for Jaimy who said he
had an errand and would pick me up again and take me personally into
Mexicali, Mexico, to meet his friends. My plan was to have a nice cheap
supper in Mexico and
then roll on that night. Jaimy didn't show up, of course. I crossed the border
by myself and turned sharp right at the gate
to avoid the hawker street and went immediately to relieve myself of
water in construction dirt but a crazy
Mexican watchman with an official uniform thought it was a big infringement and
said something and when I said I didn't know (No se) he said "No
sabes police?"—the nerve of him
to call the cops because I peed on his dirt ground. But I did notice
afterward and felt sad, that I had watered the spot where he sat to light a
small fire nights because there were wood coals piled so I moved up the muddy
street feeling meek and truly sorry, with the big pack on my back, as he stared after me with his doleful stare.
I came to a hill and saw great
mudflat riverbottoms with stinks and tarns
and awful paths with women and burros ambling in the dusk, an old Chinese Mexican beggar caught my eye
and we stopped to chat, when I told him I might go Dormiendo sleep in those flats (I was really thinking of a little
beyond the flats, in the foothills) he looked horrified and, being a deafmute, he demonstrated that I would be robbed of
my pack and killed if I tried it, which I suddenly realized was true. I wasn't
in America any more. Either side of the border,
either way you slice the boloney, a homeless man was in hot water. Where
would I find a quiet grove to meditate in, to live in forever? After the old
man tried to tell me his life story by signs I walked away waving and smiling
and crossed the flats and narrow board bridge over the yellow
I26
water and over to the poor adobe district of Mexicali where
the Mexico gaiety as ever charmed me, and I
ate a delicious tin bowl of garbanzo soup with pieces of cabeza (head)
and cebolla (onion) raw, having cashed a quarter at the border gate for three
paper pesos and a big pile of huge pennies. While eating at the little mud
street counter I dug the street, the
people, the poor bitch dogs, the cantinas, the whores, the music, men goofing in the narrow road wrestling,
and across the street an unforgettable beauty parlor (Salon de Belleza)
with a bare mirror on a bare wall and bare chairs and one little seventeen-year-old beauty with her hair in
pins dreaming at the mirror, but an old plaster bust with periwig beside her,
and a big man with a mustache in a Scandinavian ski sweater picking his teeth
behind and a little boy at the next mirror chair eating a banana and out on the
sidewalk some little children gathered like
before a movie house and I thought "Oh
all Mexicali on some Saturday afternoon! Thank you O Lord for returning
me my zest for life, for Thy ever-recurring forms in Thy Womb of Exuberant
Fertility." All my tears weren't in
vain. It'll all work out finally.
Then, strolling, I bought a hot
doughnut stick, then two oranges from a
girl, and re-crossed the bridge in dust of evening and headed for the
border gate happy. But here I was stopped
by three unpleasant American guards and my whole rucksack was searched sullenly.
"What'd
you buy in Mexico?"
"Nothing."
They didn't
believe me. They fished around. After fingering my wraps of leftover frenchfries from
Beaumont and raisins and
peanuts and carrots, and cans of pork and beans I made sure to have for the
road, and half-loaves of whole wheat
127
bread they got disgusted and let me go. It was funny,
really; they were expecting a rucksack full of opium from Sinaloa, no doubt, or
weed from Mazatlan, or heroin from Panama. Maybe they thought I'd walked all
the way from Panama. ; They couldn't figure
me out.
I went to the Greyhound bus
station and bought a short ticket to El Centro and the main highway. I figured
I'd catch the Arizona Midnight Ghost and be
in Yuma that same night and sleep in
the Colorado riverbottom, which I'd noticed long ago. But it wound up,
in El Centro I went to the yards and angled around and finally talked to a
conductor passing the sign to a switch
engine: "Where's the Zipper?"
"It
don't come through El Centro."
I
was surprised at my stupidity.
"Only freight you can catch
goes through Mexico, then Yuma, but they'll find you and kick you out and
you'll wind up in a Mexican calaboose
boy."
"I've
had enough of Mexico. Thanks." So I went to the big intersection in town with the
cars turning for the eastward run to Yuma and started thumbing. I had no luck
for an hour. Suddenly a big truck pulled up
to the side; the driver got out and fiddled with his suitcase. "You goin
on east?" I asked.
"Soon
as I spend a little time in Mexicali. You know anything about
Mexico?"
"Lived
there for years." He looked me over. He was a good old joe, fat, happy,
middlewestern. He liked me.
"How about showin me around
Mexicali tonight then I'll drive you to Tucson."
"Great!"
We got in the truck and went right back to Mexicali on the road I'd just covered in the bus. But it was
worth it to get clear to Tucson. We parked the truck in Calexico,
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which was quiet now, at eleven, and
went over into Mexicali and I took him away from tourist-trap
honkytonks and led him to the good old saloons of real Mexico where
there were girls at a peso a dance and raw tequila and lots of fun. It
was a big night, he
danced and enjoyed himself, had his picture taken with a senorita and drank about twenty shots of tequila. Somewhere during the night we hooked up with a colored
guy who was some kind of queer but
was awfully funny and led us to a whorehouse and then as we were coming
put a Mexican cop relieved him of his
snapknife.
"That's
my third knife this month those bastards stole from
me,"
he said.
In the morning Beaudry (the driver)
and I got back to the truck bleary eyes and hungover and he wasted no time and drove right straight to Yuma, not going back to
El Centro, but on the excellent
no-traffic Highway 98 straight a hundred miles after hitting 80 at Gray
Wells. Soon we were in fact coming into Tucson. We'd eaten a slight lunch
outside Yuma and now he said he was hungry
for a good steak. "Only thing is these truck stops ain't got big enough
steaks to suit me."
"Well you just park your
truck up one of these Tucson supermarkets on the highway and I'll buy a
two-inch thick T-bone and we'll stop in the
desert and I'll light a fire and broil you
the greatest steak of your life." He didn't really believe it but I
did it. Outside the lights of Tucson in a flaming red dusk over the desert, he stopped and I lit a fire with mesquite branches, adding bigger branches and logs later,
as it got dark, and when the coals were hot I tried to hold the steak
over them with a spit but the spit burned so I just fried the huge steaks in
their own fat in my lovely new potpan cover and
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handed him my jackknife and he went
to it and said "Hm, om, wow, that is the best steak I ever et."
I'd also
bought milk and we had just steak and milk, a great protein feast, squatting there in
the sand as highway cars zipped by our
little red fire. "Where'd you learn to do all these funny
things?" he laughed. "And you know I say funny but there's sumpthin so durned sensible about 'em.
Here I am killin myself drivin this
rig back and forth from Ohio to L.A. and I make more money than you ever
had in your whole life as a hobo, but you're the one who enjoys life and not
only that but you do it without workin or a whole lot of money. Now who's
smart, you or me?" And he had a nice home in Ohio with wife, daughter,
Christmas tree, two cars, garage, lawn, lawnmower,
but he couldn't enjoy any of it because he really wasn't free. It was sadly true. It didn't mean I
was a better man than he was, however, he was a great man and I liked
him and he liked me and said "Well I'll tell you, supposin I drive you all
the way to Ohio."
"Wow, great! That'll take me
just about home! I'm goin south of there to North Carolina."
"I was
hesitatin at first on account of them Markell insurance men, see if they catch you ridin
with me I'll lose my job."
"Oh
hell . . . and ain't that somethin typical."
"It
shore is, but I'll tell you sumpthin, after this steak you made for me, even though I paid for it, but you
cooked it and here you are washin your dishes in sand, I'll just have to
tell them to stick the job up their ass because now you're my friend and I got
a right to give my friend a ride."
"Okay," I said,
"and I'll pray we don't get stopped by no Markell insurance men."
I30
"Good chance of that because
it's Saturday now and we'll be in Springfield Ohio at about dawn Tuesday if I
push this rig and it's their weekend off
more or less."
And did he ever push that rig! From that desert in Arizona
he roared on up to New Mexico, took the cut through Las Cruces up to Alamogordo
where the atom bomb was first blasted and where I had a strange vision as we
drove along seeing in the clouds above the Alamogordo mountains the words as if
imprinted in the sky: "This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of
Anything" (which was a strange place for that strange true vision) and
then he batted on through the beautiful Atascadero Indian country in the
uphills of New Mexico beautiful green valleys and pines and New England-like
rolling meadows and then down to Oklahoma (at outside Bowie Arizona we'd had a
short nap at dawn, he in the truck, me in my bag in the cold red clay with just
stars blazing silence overhead and a distant coyote), in no time at all he was
going up through Arkansas and eating it up in one afternoon and then Missouri
and St. Louis and finally on Monday night bashing across Illinois and Indiana
and into old snowy Ohio with all the cute Christmas lights making my heart joy
in the windows of old farms. "Wow," I thought, "all the way from the warm arms of the senoritas of Mexicali
to the Christmas snows of Ohio in one fast ride." He had a radio
on his dashboard and played it booming all the way, too. We didn't talk much,
he just yelled once in a while, telling an anecdote, and had such a loud voice
that he actually pierced my eardrum (the left one) and made it hurt, making me
jump two feet in my seat. He was great. We
had a lot of good meals, too, en route, in various favorite truckstops
of his, one in Oklahoma where we had roast pork and yams worthy of my
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mother's own kitchen, we ate and ate, he was always hungry,
in fact so was I, it was winter cold now and Christmas was on the fields and
food was good.
In Independence Missouri we made
our only stop to sleep in a room, in a hotel at almost five dollars apiece,
which was robbery, but he needed the sleep and I couldn't wait in the
below-zero truck. When I woke up in the morning, on Monday, I looked out and
saw all the eager young men in business suits going to work in insurance
offices hoping to be big Harry Trumans some day. By Tuesday dawn he let me off
in downtown Springfield Ohio in a deep cold wave and we said goodbye just a little sadly.
I went to a lunchcart, drank tea,
figured my budget, went to a hotel and had one good exhausted sleep. Then I
bought a bus ticket to Rocky Mount, as it was impossible to hitchhike from Ohio
to North Carolina in all that winter mountain country through the Blue Ridge
and all. But I got impatient and decided to hitchhike anyway and asked the bus
to stop on the outskirts and walked back to the bus station to cash my ticket.
They wouldn't give me the money. The upshot of my insane impatience was that I
had to wait eight more hours for the next slow bus to Charleston West Virginia.
I started hitchhiking out of Springfield figuring to catch the bus in a town farther
down, just for fun, and froze my feet and hands standing in dismal country
roads in freezing dusk. One good ride took me to a little town and there I just
waited around the tiny telegraph office which served as a station, till my bus
arrived. Then it was a crowded bus going
slowly over the mountains all night long and in the dawn the laborious
climb over the Blue Ridge with beautiful timbered country in the snow, then
after a whole day of stopping and starting, stopping
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and starting, down out of the mountains into Mount Airy and finally after ages Raleigh where I
transferred to my local bus and instructed the driver to let me off at the
country road that wound three miles
through the piney woods to my mother's house in Big Easonburg Woods which is a
country crossroad outside Rocky
Mount.
He let me off, at about eight
p.m., and I walked the three miles in silent
freezing Carolina road of moon, watching a jet plane overhead, her stream drifting across the face of the moon and bisecting the snow circle. It was beautiful to
be back east in the snow at Christmas time, the little lights in
occasional farm windows, the quiet woods, the piney barrens so naked and drear,
the railroad track that ran off into the gray blue woods toward my dream.
At nine o'clock I was stomping
with full pack across my mother's yard and there she was at the white tiled
sink in the kitchen, washing her dishes,
with a rueful expression waiting for me (I was late), worried I'd never
even make it and probably thinking,
"Poor Raymond, why does he always have to hitchhike and worry me to
death, why isn't he like other men?"
And I thought of Japhy as I stood there in the cold yard looking at her:
"Why is he so mad about white tiled sinks and 'kitchen machinery' he calls
it? People have good hearts whether or not
they live like Dharma Bums. Compassion is the heart of Buddhism." Behind the house was a great pine forest where
I would spend all that winter and spring meditating under the trees and finding
out by myself the truth of all things. I was very happy. I walked around the
house and looked at the Christmas tree in
the window. A hundred yards down the road the two country stores made a
bright warm scene in the otherwise bleak wooded void. I went to the dog
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house and found old Bob trembling and snorting in the cold.
He whimpered glad to see me. I unleashed him
and he yipped and leaped around and came into the house with me where I embraced my mother in the warm kitchen and my
sister and brother-in-law came out of the parlor and greeted me, and
little nephew Lou too, and I was home again.
They all wanted me to sleep on
the couch in the parlor by the comfortable oil-burning stove but I insisted on making my room (as before) on the back porch
with its six windows looking out on the winter barren cottonfield and the pine woods beyond, leaving all the windows open
and stretching my good old sleeping
bag on the couch there to sleep the pure sleep of winter nights with my
head buried inside the smooth nylon
duck-down warmth. After they'd gone to bed I put on my jacket and my earmuff cap and railroad gloves and over
all that my nylon poncho and strode out in the cotton-field moonlight like a shroudy monk. The ground was covered with
moonlit frost/The old cemetery down the road gleamed in the frost. The roofs of
nearby farmhouses were like white panels of
snow. I went through the cottonfield rows followed by Bob, a big bird
dog, and little Sandy who belonged to the Joyners down the road, and a few
other stray dogs (all dogs love me) and
came to the edge of the forest. In there, the pre-
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vious spring, I'd worn out a little path going to meditate under a favorite baby pine. The path was still
there. My official entrance to the forest was still there, this being
two evenly spaced young pines making kind of
gate posts. I always bowed there and clasped my hands and thanked
Avalokitesvara for the privilege of the
wood. Then I went in, led moonwhite Bob direct to my pine, where my old
bed of straw was still at the foot of the
tree. I arranged my cape and legs and sat to meditate.
The dogs meditated on their paws.
We were all absolutely quiet. The entire moony countryside was frosty silent,
not even the little tick of rabbits or
coons anywhere. An absolute cold
blessed silence. Maybe a dog barking five miles away toward Sandy
Cross. Just the faintest, faintest sound of big trucks rolling out the night on 301, about twelve miles away, and
of course the distant occasional Diesel baugh of the Atlantic Coast Line passenger and freight trains going north and south to New York and Florida. A blessed night. I
immediately fell into a blank thoughtless trance wherein it was again revealed
to me "This thinking has stopped" and I sighed because I didn't have to think any more and felt my
whole body sink into a blessedness surely to be believed, completely relaxed and at peace with all the ephemeral world of
dream and dreamer and the dreaming itself. All kinds of thoughts, too, like "One man practicing kindness in the
wilderness is worth all the temples
this world pulls" and I reached out and stroked old Bob, who looked
at me satisfied. "All living and dying things
like these dogs and me coming and going without any duration or self
substance, O God, and therefore we can't possibly exist. How strange, how
worthy, how good for us! What a horror it would have been if the world was
real,
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because if the world was real, it would be immortal."
My nylon poncho protected me from the cold, like a fitted-on tent, and I stayed a long time sitting crosslegged
in the winter midnight woods, about an hour. Then I went back to the
house, warmed up by the fire in the living room while the others slept, then
slipped into my bag on the porch and fell asleep.
The
following night was Christmas Eve which I spent with a bottle of wine before the TV
enjoying the shows and the midnight mass from Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New
York with bishops ministering, and doctrines
glistering, and congregations, the priests in their lacy snow vestments
before great official altars not half as great as my straw mat beneath a little pine tree I figured. Then at midnight the
breathless little parents, my sister and brother-in-law, laying out the
presents . under the tree and more
gloriful than all the Gloria in Excelsis Deos of Rome Church and all its attendant bishops. "For after all,"
I thought, "Augustine was a spade and Francis my idiot brother." My cat Davey suddenly blessed me,
sweet cat, with his arrival on my lap. I took out the Bible and read a
little Saint Paul by the warm stove and the light of the tree, "Let him become a fool, that he may become wise,"
and I thought of good dear Japhy and wished he was enjoying the Christmas
Eve with me. "Already are ye filled," says Saint Paul, "already are ye become rich. The saints shall
judge the world." Then in a
burst of beautiful poetry more beautiful than all the poetry readings of all the San Francisco
Renaissances of Time: "Meats for the belly, and the belly for
meats; but God shall bring to naught both
it and them."
"Yep," I thought, "you
pay through the nose for shortlived shows. . . ."
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That week I was all alone in the
house, my mother had to go to New York for a funeral, and the others worked.
Every afternoon I went into the piney woods with my dogs, read, studied,
meditated, in the warm winter southern sun, and came back and made supper for everybody at dusk. Also, I put up
a basket and shot baskets every sundown. At night, after they went to bed, back I went to the woods in
starlight or even in rain sometimes with my poncho. The woods received
me well. I amused myself writing little Emily Dickinson poems like "Light
a fire, fight a liar, what's the difference, in existence?" or "A
watermelon seed, produces a need, large and juicy,
such autocracy."
"Let
there be blowing-out and bliss forevermore," I prayed in the
woods at night. I kept making newer and better prayers. And more poems, like when the
snow came, "Not oft, the holy snow, so soft, the holy bow," and at
one point I wrote "The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting
Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy." Or I wrote, on
dull afternoons when neither Buddhism nor poetry nor wine nor solitude nor
basketball would avail my lazy but earnest
flesh, "Nothin to do, Oh poo! Practically blue." One afternoon I watched the ducks in the pig
field across the road and it was Sunday, and the hollering preachers
were screaming on the Carolina radio and I
wrote: "Imagine blessing all living and dying worms in eternity and
the ducks that eat 'em . . . there's your Sunday school sermon." In a
dream I heard the words, "Pain, 'tis but a concubine's puff." But in Shakespeare it would say, "Ay, by my faith,
that bears a frosty sound." Then suddenly one night after supper as
I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of
the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the
ground and cried
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"I'm gonna die!" because there was nothing else
to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh
inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like
milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the
truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my
dead father and dead brother and
dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree
of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world
is an ethereal flower, and ye live. I knew this! I also knew that I was the
worst bum in the world. The diamond light was in my eyes.
My cat meowed at the icebox, anxious to see what all the good dear delight was. I fed him.
After a
while my meditations and studies began to bear fruit. It really started late in January, one frosty
night in the woods in the dead silence it seemed I almost heard the words said:
"Everything is all right forever and forever and forever." I let out
a big Hoo, one o'clock in the morning, the dogs
leaped up and exulted. I felt like yelling it to the stars. I clasped my
hands and prayed, "O wise and serene spirit of Awakenerhood, everything's all right forever and forever and forever
and thank you thank you thank you amen." What'd
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I care about the tower of ghouls, and sperm and bones and dust, I felt free and therefore I was free.
I suddenly
felt the desire to write to Warren Coughlin, who was strong in my thoughts now
as I recalled his modesty and general silence among the vain screams of
myself and Alvah and Japhy: "Yes, Coughlin, it's a shining now-ness
and we've done it, carried America like a shining blanket into that brighter nowhere
Already."
It began to get warmer in February
and the ground began to melt a little and the nights in the woods were milder, my sleeps on the porch more enjoyable. The stars
seemed to get wet in the sky, bigger. Under the stars I'd be dozing
crosslegged under my tree and in my half-asleep mind I'd be saying "Moab?
Who is Moab?" and I'd wake up with a burr in my hand, a cotton burr off
one of the dogs. So, awake, I'd make thoughts
like "It's all different appearances of the same thing, my drowsiness, the
burr, Moab, all one ephemeral dream. All belongs to the same emptiness, glory be!" Then I'd run these words
through my mind to train myself: "I am emptiness, I am not different from emptiness, neither is
emptiness different from me; indeed, emptiness is me." There'd be a
puddle of water with a star shining in it, I'd spit in the puddle, the star would be obliterated, I'd say "That star is
real?"
I wasn't exactly unconscious of
the fact that I had a good warm fire to
return to after these midnight meditations, provided kindly for me by
my brother-in-law, who was getting a little
sick and tired of my hanging around not working. Once I told him a line
from something, about how one grows through
suffering, he said: "If you grow through suffering by this time I oughta be as big as the side of the
house."
139
When I'd go to the country store to buy bread and milk the
old boys there sitting around among bamboo poles and molasses barrels'd say, "What you do in those woods?" "Oh I just go in there to study." "Ain't
you kinda old to be a college student?" "Well
I just go in there sometimes and just sleep." But I'd watch them rambling around the fields all
day looking for something to do, so
their wives would think they were real busy hardworking men, and they
weren't fooling me either. I knew they secretly wanted to go sleep in the
woods, or just sit and do nothing in the woods, like I wasn't too ashamed to
do. They never bothered me. How could I tell' them
that my knowing was the knowing that the substance of my bones and their
bones and the bones of dead men in the earth
of rain at night is the common individual substance that is
everlastingly tranquil and blissful? Whether they believed it or not makes no
difference, too. One night in my rain cape I sat in a regular downpour and I had
a little song to go with the pattering rain on my rubber hood: "Raindrops
are ecstasy, raindrops are not different from ecstasy, neither is ecstasy different from raindrops, yea, ecstasy is
raindrops, rain on, O cloud!" So
what did I care what the old tobacco-chewing stickwhittlers at the crossroads
store had to say about my mortal
eccentricity, we all get to be gum in graves anyway. I even got a little
drunk with one of the old men one time and we went
driving around the country roads and I actually told him how I was sitting out
in those woods meditating and he really rather understood and said he
would like to try that if he had time, or
if he could get up enough nerve, and had a little rueful envy in his
voice. Everybody knows everything.
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Spring came
after heavy rains that washed everything, brown puddles were everywhere in moist, sere fields.
Strong warm winds whipped snow white clouds across the sun and dry air. Golden
days with beauteous moon at night, warm,
one emboldened frog picking up a croak song at eleven p.m. in
"Buddha Creek" where I had established my new straw sitting place under a twisted twin tree by a little opening in the pines and a dry stretch of grass and a tiny
brook. There, one day, my nephew little Lou came with me and I took an object from the ground and raised it silently,
sitting under the tree, and little Lou facing me asked "What's
that?" and I said "That" and
made a leveling motion with my hand, saying, "Tathata,"
repeating, "That . . . It's that" and only when I told him it was a pine cone did he make the
imaginary judgment of the word "pine cone," for, indeed, as
it says in the sutra: "Emptiness is discrimination," and he said
"My head jumped out, and my brain went crooked and then my eyes started
lookin like cucumbers and my hair'd a cowlick on it and the cowlick licked my
chin." Then he said "Why don't I make up a poem?" He wanted to
commemorate the moment. "Okay,
but make it up right away, just as you go along."
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"Okay .
. . 'The pine trees are wavin, the wind is tryin to whisper somethin, the birds
are sayin drit-drit-drit, and the hawks are goin hark-hark-hark—' Oho, we're
in for danger."
"Why?"
"Hawk—hark hark hark!"
"Then what?"
"Hark!
Hark!— Nothin." I puffed on my silent pipe, peace and quiet in
my heart.
I called my new grove "Twin
Tree Grove," because of the two
treetrunks I leaned against, that wound around each other, white spruce shining white in the night and
showing me from hundreds of feet away
where I was heading, although old Bob whitely showed me the way down the
dark path. On that path one night I lost my juju beads Japhy'd given me, but the next day I found them right in the
path, figuring, "The Dharma can't be lost, nothing can be lost, on
a well-worn path."
There were
now early spring mornings with the happy dogs, me forgetting the Path of
Buddhism and just being glad; looking around at new little birds not yet
summer fat; the dogs yawning and almost swallowing my Dharma; the grass
waving, hens chuckling. Spring nights, practicing Dhyana under the cloudy moon.
I'd see the truth: "Here, this, is It. The world as it is, is
Heaven, I'm looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it's only
this poor pitiful world that's Heaven. Ah, if I could realize, if
I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the
freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I'd realize
what there is, is ecstasy."
Long
afternoons just sitting in the straw until I was tired of
"thinking nothing" and just going to sleep and having little flash dreams
like the strange one I had once of being up in
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some
kind of gray ghostly attic hauling up
suitcases of gray meat my mother is handing up and I'm petulantly complaining:
"I won't come down again!" (to
do this work of the world). I felt I was a blank being called upon to enjoy the
ecstasy of the endless truebody.
Days tumbled on days, I was in my overalls, didn't comb my hair, didn't
shave much, consorted only with dogs and
cats, I was living the happy life of childhood again. Meanwhile 1 wrote
and got an assignment for the coming summer as a fire lookout for the U. S. Forest Service on Desolation Peak in the
High Cascades in Washington state. So I figured to set out for Japhy's shack in
March to be nearer Washington for my summer
job.
Sunday
afternoons my family would want me to go driving with them but I preferred to stay home alone, and they'd get mad and
say "What's the matter with him anyway?" and I'd hear them argue about the futility of my
"Buddhism" in the kitchen, then they'd all get in the car and leave
and I'd go in the kitchen and sing "The tables are empty,
everybody's gone over" to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "You're
Learning the Blues." I was as nutty as a fruitcake and happier. Sunday
afternoon, then, I'd go to my woods with the dogs and sit and put out my hands
palms up and accept handfuls of sun boiling over the palms. "Nirvana is
the moving paw," I'd say, seeing the first thing I saw as I opened my eyes
from meditation, that being Bob's paw moving in the grass as he dreamed. Then
I'd go back to the house on my clear, pure, well-traveled path, waiting for the
night when again I'd see the countless Buddhas hiding in the moonlight air.
But my serenity was finally disturbed by a curious argument
with my brother-in-law; he began to resent my un-
143
shackling
Bob the dog and taking him in the woods with me. "I've got too much money
invested in that dog to untie him from his
chain."
I said "How would you like to be tied to a chain and
cry all day like the dog?"
He replied "It doesn't bother me" and my
sister said "And / don't care."
I got so mad I stomped off into the
woods, it was a Sunday afternoon, and resolved
to sit there without food till midnight and come back and pack my things in
the night and leave. But in a few hours my
mother was calling me from the back
porch to supper, I wouldn't come; finally little Lou came out to my tree
and begged me to come back.
I had frogs in the little brook that kept croaking at the
oddest times, interrupting my meditations as if by design, once at high noon a
frog croaked three times and was silent the
rest of the day, as though expounding me the Triple Vehicle. Now my frog
croaked once. I felt it was a signal meaning the One Vehicle of Compassion and
went back determined to overlook the whole thing, even my pity about the dog.
What a sad and bootless dream. In the woods again that night, fingering the juju beads, I went through curious prayers
like these: "My pride is hurt, that is emptiness; my business is with the
Dharma, that is emptiness; I'm proud of my kindness to animals, that is
emptiness; my conception of the chain, that
is emptiness; Ananda's pity, even that is emptiness." Perhaps if some old Zen Master had been on the scene, he
would have gone out and kicked the dog on his chain to give everybody a sudden
shot of awakening. My pain was in getting
rid of the conception of people and dogs anyway, and of myself. I was
hurting deep inside from the sad business of
144
trying to deny what was. In any case it was a tender
little drama in the Sunday countryside: "Raymond doesn't want the dog
chained." But then suddenly under the tree at night, I had the astonishing
idea: "Everything is empty but awake! Things
are empty in time and space and mind." I figured it all out and the
next day feeling very exhilarated I felt the time had come to explain everything
to my family. They laughed more than
anything else. "But listen! No! Look! It's simple, let me lay it
out as simple and concise as I can. All things are empty, ain't they?"
"Whattayou mean, empty, I'm
holding this orange in my hand, ain't
I?"
"It's empty, everythin's
empty, things come but to go, all things
made have to be unmade, and they'll have to be unmade simply because they were made!"
Nobody would buy even that.
"You
and your Buddha, why don't you stick to the religion you were
born with?" my mother and sister said.
"Everything's
gone, already gone, already come and gone," I yelled. "Ah," stomping around, coming back,
"and things are empty because they appear, don't they, you see them, but
they're made up of atoms that can't be measured or weighed or taken hold of, even the dumb scientists know that now,
there isn't any finding of the farthest atom so-called, things are just
empty arrangements of something that seems solid appearing in the space, they
ain't either big or small, near or far,
true or false, they're ghosts pure and simple."
"Ghostses!" yelled
little Lou amazed. He really agreed with me
but he was afraid of my insistence on "Ghostses."
"Look," said my brother-in-law, "if
things were empty how
145
could I feel this orange, in fact taste it and swallow it,
answer me that one."
"Your mind makes out the
orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and
thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be
seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually,
that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself
it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other
words it's empty and awake."
"Well,
if that's so, I still don't care." All enthusiastic I went back to the
woods that night and thought, "What does it mean that I am
in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the
stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake
throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm
empty, awake, and that there's no
difference between me and anything else. In other words it means that
I've become the same as everything else. It means I've become a Buddha." I
really felt that and believed it and exulted to think what I had to tell Japhy
now when I got back to California. "At least he'll listen," I
pouted. I felt great compassion for the trees because we were the same thing; I
petted the dogs who didn't argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They're wiser
than their masters. I told that to the dogs, too, they listened to me perking
up their ears and licking my face. They didn't care one way or the other as
long as I was there. St. Raymond of the
Dogs is who I was that year, if no one or nothing else.
Sometimes
in the woods I'd just sit and stare at things
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themselves, trying to divine the secret of existence
anyway. I'd stare at the holy yellow long
bowing weeds that faced my grass sitmat of Tathagata Seat of Purity as they
pointed in all directions and hairily conversed as the winds dictated Ta
Ta Ta, in gossip groups with some lone weeds
proud to show off on the side, or sick ones and half-dead falling ones, the
whole congregation of living
weedhood in the wind suddenly ringing like bells and jumping to get
excited and all made of yellow stuff and sticking to the ground and I'd think This
is it. "Rop rop rop," I'd yell at the weeds, and triey'd show windward
pointing intelligent reachers to indicate and flail and finagle, some rooted in blossom imagination earth moist perturbation
idea that had karmacized their very root-and-stem. ... It was eerie. I'd fall asleep and dream the words "By
this teaching the earth came to an end," and I'd dream of my Ma nodding solemnly with her whole head, umph, and
eyes closed. What did I care about
all the irking hurts and tedious wronks of the world, the human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars. "I am
Bhikku Blank Rat!" I dreamed.
What did I care about the squawk
of the little very self which wanders everywhere? I was dealing in
outblownness, cut-off-ness, snipped,
blownoutness, putoutness, turned-off-ness, nothing-happens-ness, gone-ness, gone-out-ness, the snapped link, nir,
link, vana, snap! "The dust of my thoughts collected into a
globe," I thought, "in this ageless solitude," I thought, and really smiled, because I was seeing the white
light everywhere everything at last.
The warm
wind made the pines talk deep one night when I began to experience what is called
"Samapatti," which in Sanskrit means Transcendental Visits. I'd got a little drowsy
in
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the mind but was somehow physically wide awake sitting erect under my tree when suddenly I saw flowers,
pink worlds of walls of them, salmon pink, in the Shh of silent woods
(obtaining nirvana is like locating silence) and I saw an ancient vision of Dipankara Buddha who was the Buddha who
never said anything, Dipankara as a vast snowy Pyramid Buddha with bushy wild black eyebrows like John L. Lewis
and a terrible stare, all in an old
location, an ancient snowy field like Alban ("A new field!"
had yelled the Negro preacherwoman), the
whole vision making my hair rise. I remember the strange magic final cry that it evoked in me, whatever it
means: Coly-alcolor. It, the vision, was devoid of any sensation of I
being myself, it was pure
egolessness, just simply wild ethereal activities devoid of any wrong
predicates . . . devoid of effort, devoid of mistake. "Everything's all right,"
I thought. "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form and we're here forever
in one form or another which is empty. What
the dead have accomplished, this
rich silent hush of the Pure Awakened Land." I felt like crying out
over the woods and rooftops of North Carolina announcing the glorious and
simple truth. Then I said "I've got my
full rucksack pack and it's spring, I'm going to go southwest to the dry
land, to the long lone land of Texas and Chihuahua and the gay streets of
Mexico night, music coming out of doors,
girls, wine, weed, wild hats, viva! What does it matter? Like the ants
that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I
want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgments
and pray for the light." Sitting in my Buddha-arbor, therefore, in that
"colyalcolor" wall of flowers pink and red and ivory white, among
aviaries of magic transcendent birds
recognizing my awakening mind with sweet weird cries
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(the pathless lark), in the ethereal
perfume, mysteriously ancient, the bliss of the Buddha-fields, I saw that my
life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
A strange thing happened the next
day, to illustrate the true power I had
gained from these magic visions. My mother had been coughing for five days and her nose was running and now
her throat was beginning to hurt so much that her coughs were painful and sounded dangerous to me. I decided to go
into a deep trance and hypnotize myself, reminding myself "All is empty
and awake," to investigate the cause and cure of my mother's illness.
Instantly, in my closed eyes, I saw a vision of a brandy bottle which then I
saw to be "Heet" rubbing medicine and on top of that, superimposed
like a movie fade-in, I saw a distinct picture of little white flowers, round,
with small petals. I instantly got up, it was midnight,
my mother was coughing in her bed, and I went and took several bowls of
bachelor's buttons my sister had arranged around the house the week before and
I set them outside. Then I took some "Heet" out of the medicine cabinet
and told my mother to rub it on her neck. The next day her cough was gone.
Later on, after I was gone hitchhiking west, a nurse friend of ours heard the
story and said "Yes, it sounds like an
allergy to the flowers." During this vision and this action I knew
perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilizing
physical opportunities to punish themselves because of their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha
nature, or Allah nature, or any name
you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This
was my first and last "miracle" because I was afraid of getting too
interested in this and becoming vain. I was
a little scared too, of all the responsibility.
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Everybody
in the family heard of my vision and what I did but they didn't seem to think much of it: in fact I didn't,
either. And that was right. I was very rich
now, a super myriad trillionaire in
Samapatti transcendental graces, because of good humble karma, maybe because I had pitied the dog and forgiven men. But I knew now that I was a bliss
heir, and that the final sin, the worst, is righteousness. So I would
shut up and just hit the road and go see
Japhy. "Don't let the blues make you
bad," sings Frank Sinatra. On my final night in the woods, the eve
of my departure by thumb, I heard the word "star-body" concerning how things don't have to be made to disappear but to awake, to their supremely pure
truebody and star-body. I saw there was nothing to do because nothing
ever happened, nothing ever would happen,
all things were empty light. So I took off well fortified, with my pack,
kissing my mother goodbye. She had paid five
dollars to have brand new thick rubber soles with cleats put on the
bottom of my old boots and now I was all
set for a summer working in the mountains.
Our old country-store friend, Buddhy Tom, a character in his own right, took me in his vehicle out to
Highway 64 and there we waved goodbye and I started hitching three thousand miles
back to California. I would be home again the next Christmas.
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Meanwhile Japhy was waiting for me in his nice little shack
in Corte Madera California. He was settled in Sean Monahan's hermitage, a
wooden cabin built behind a cypress windrow on a steep little grassy hill also
covered with eucalyptus and pine, behind Sean's main house. The shack had been
built by an old man to die in, years ago. It was well built. I was invited to
go live there as long as I wanted, rent free. The shack had been made habitable
after years as a wreck, by Sean Monahan's brother-in-law Whitey Jones, a good
young carpenter, who had put in burlap over the wood walls and a good woodstove
and a kerosene lamp and then never lived in it, having to go to work out of
town. So Japhy'd moved in to finish his studies and live the good solitary life. If anybody wanted to go see him it was
a steep climb. On the floor were woven grass mats and Japhy said in a letter
"I sit and smoke a pipe and drink tea and hear the wind beat the slender
eucalyptus limbs like whips and the
cypress windrow roars." He'd stay there until May 15, his sailing
date for Japan, where he had been invited by an American foundation to stay in
a monastery and study under a Master. "Meanwhile," wrote Japhy,
"come share a wild man's dark cabin with wine and weekend girls and good
pots of food and woodfire heat. Monahan will
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give
us grocery bucks to fall a few trees in his big yard and buck and split 'em out
for firewood and I'll teach you all about
logging."
During that winter Japhy had hitchhiked up to his
home-country in the Northwest, up through Portland in snow, farther up to the
blue ice glacier country, finally northern Washington on the farm of a friend
in the Nooksack Valley, a week in a berrypicker's splitshake cabin, and a few
climbs around. The names like "Nooksack" and "Mount Baker National
Forest" excited in my mind a beautiful crystal vision of snow and ice and
pines in the Far North of my childhood dreams. . . . But I was standing on the
very hot April road of North Carolina waiting for my first ride, which came
very soon from a young high-school kid who took me to a country town called
Nashville, where I broiled in the sun a half-hour till I got a ride from a
taciturn but kindly naval officer who drove me clear to Greenville South
Carolina. After that whole winter and early
spring of incredible peace sleeping on my porch and resting in my woods,
the stint of hitchhiking was harder than ever and more like hell than ever. In
Greenville in fact I walked three miles in the burning sun for nothing, lost
in the maze of downtown back streets, looking for a certain highway, and at one point passed a kind of forge where colored
men were all black and sweaty and covered with coal and I cried "I'm
suddenly in hell again!" as I felt the blast of heat.
But it began to rain on the road and few rides took me into
the rainy night of Georgia, where I rested sitting on my pack under the overhanging sidewalk roofs of old hardware stores
and drank a half pint of wine. A rainy night, no rides. When the Greyhound bus
came I hailed it down and rode to
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Gainesville. In Gainesville I thought
I'd sleep by the railroad tracks awhile but they were about a mile away and just as I
thought of sleeping in the yard a local crew came out to switch and saw me, so I retired to an empty lot
by the tracks, but the cop car kept circling around using its spot (had probably
heard of me from the railroad men, probably not) so I gave it up, mosquitoes
anyway, and went back to town and stood waiting for a ride in the bright lights
by the luncheonettes of downtown, the cops seeing me plainly and therefore not searching for me or worrying about me.
But no ride, and dawn coming, so
I slept in a four-dollar room in a hotel and
showered and rested well. But what feelings of homelessness and bleak,
again, as the Christmas trip east. All I had to be really proud of were my fine
new thick-soled workshoes and my full pack.
In the morning, after breakfast in a
dismal Georgia restaurant with revolving fans on the ceiling and mucho flies, I went out on the
broiling highway and got a ride from a truckdriver to Flowery Branch
Georgia, then a few spot rides on through Atlanta to the other side at another small town called Stonewall, where I was
picked up by a big fat Southerner with a broadbrimmed hat who reeked of whisky and kept telling jokes and turning to look
at me to see if I laughed, meanwhile
sending the car spurting into the soft shoulders
and leaving big clouds of dust behind us, so that long before he reached
his destination I begged off and said I wanted
to get off to eat.
"Heck, boy, I'll eat with ya
'n' drive ya on." He was drunk and he
drove very fast.
"Well I gotta go to the
toilet," I said trailing off my voice.
The experience had bugged me so I decided, "The hell with
hitchhiking. I've got enough money to take a bus to El
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Paso and from there I'll hop Southern Pacific freights and
be ten times safer." Besides the
thought of being all the way out in
El Paso Texas in that dry Southwest of clear blue skies and endless
desert land to sleep in, no cops, made up my mind. I was anxious to get out of
the South, out of chaingang Georgia.
The bus came at four o'clock and
we were at Birmingham Alabama in the middle of the night, where I waited on a
bench for my next bus trying to sleep on my arms on my rucksack but kept waking up to see the pale ghosts of American
bus stations wandering around: in fact one woman streamed by like a wisp of smoke, I was definitely certain she didn't
exist for sure. On her face the phantasmal belief in what she was doing . . .
On my face, for that matter, too. After
Birmingham it was soon Louisiana and then east Texas oilfields, then Dallas, then a long day's ride in
a bus crowded with servicemen across the long immense waste of Texas, to the
ends of it, El Paso, arriving at midnight, by now I being so exhausted all I wanted to do was sleep. But I
didn't go to a hotel, I had to watch
my money now, and instead I just hauled my pack to my back and walked
straight for the railroad yards to stretch my bag out somewhere behind the
tracks. It was then, that night, that I realized the dream that had made me want to buy the pack.
It was a beautiful night and the
most beautiful sleep of my life. First I
went to the yards and walked through, warily, behind lines of boxcars, and got out to the west end of the yard but
kept going because suddenly I saw in the dark there was indeed a lot of desert
land out there. I could see rocks, dry bushes, imminent mountains of them
faintly in the starlight. "Why hang
around viaducts and tracks," I reasoned, "when all
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I gotta do is exert a little footwork and I'll be safe out
of reach of all yard cops and bums too for that matter." I just kept walking along the mainline track for a few
miles and soon I was in the open desert mountain country. My thick boots
walked well on the ties and rocks. It was
now about one a.m., I longed to sleep off the long trip from Carolina.
Finally I saw a mountain to the right I liked, after passing a long valley with many lights in it distinctly a
penitentiary or prison. "Stay away from that yard, son," I
thought. I went up a dry arroyo and in the starlight the sand and rocks were
white. I climbed and climbed.
Suddenly I
was exhilarated to realize I was completely alone and safe and
nobody was going to wake me up all night long. What an amazing revelation! And I had everything I needed
right on my back; I'd put fresh bus-station water in my polybdenum bottle before leaving. I climbed up the arroyo, so finally when I turned and looked back I could see
all of Mexico, all of Chihuahua, the entire sand-glittering desert of
it, under a late sinking moon that was huge
and bright just over the Chihuahua mountains. The Southern Pacific rails
run right along parallel to the Rio Grande
River outside of El Paso, so from
where I was, on the American side, I could see right down to the river
itself separating the two borders. The sand in the arroyo was soft as silk. I spread my sleeping bag on it and took off
my shoes and had a slug of water and lit my pipe and crossed my legs and felt glad. Not a sound; it was still winter in
the desert. Far off, just the sound of the yards where they were kicking cuts
of cars with a great splowm waking up all El Paso, but not me. All I had
for companionship was that moon of
Chihuahua sinking lower and lower as I looked, losing its white light
and getting more and more yellow butter, yet
155
when I turned in to sleep it was
bright as a lamp in my face and I had to turn my face away to sleep. In
keeping with my naming
of little spots with personal names, I called this spot "Apache Gulch." I slept well indeed.
In the morning I discovered a
rattlesnake trail in the sand but that might have been from the summer before.
There were very few bootmarks, and those were hunters' boots. The sky was flawlessly blue in the morning, the
sun hot, plenty of little dry wood to light a breakfast fire. I had cans
of pork and beans in my spacious pack. I had a royal breakfast. The problem now
was water, though, as I drank it all and the sun was hot and I got thirsty. I
climbed up the arroyo investigating it further and came to the end of it, a
solid wall of rock, and at the foot of it even deeper softer sand than that of
the night before. I decided to camp there that night, after a pleasant day
spent in old Juarez enjoying the church and streets
and food of Mexico. For a while I contemplated leaving my pack hidden
among rocks but the chances were slim yet possible
that some old hobo or hunter would come along and find it so I hauled it
on my back and went down the arroyo to the
rails again and walked back three miles into El Paso and left the pack
in a twenty-five-cent locker in the railroad station. Then I walked through
the city and out to the border gate and
crossed over for two pennies.
It turned
out to be an insane day, starting sanely enough in the church of Mary Guadaloupe and
a saunter in the Indian Markets and resting
on park benches among the gay childlike Mexicans but later the bars and a few too many to drink, yelling
at old mustachioed Mexican peons "Todas las granas de arena del desierto de Chihuahua son
vacuidad!" and finally I ran into
a bunch of evil Mexican Apaches of some kind who took
156
me
to their dripping stone pad and turned me on by candlelight and invited their
friends and it was all a lot of shadowy heads
by candlelight and smoke. In fact I got sick of it and remembered my perfect white sand gulch and the place
where I would sleep tonight and I excused myself. But they didn't want
me to leave. One of them stole a few things from my bag of purchases but I
didn't care. One of the Mexican boys was
queer and had fallen in love with me and wanted to go to California with me. It
was night now in Juarez; all the nightclubs were wailing away. We went
for a short beer in one nightclub which was exclusively Negro soldiers
sprawling around with senoritas in their laps, a mad bar, with rock and roll on
the jukebox, a regular paradise. The Mexican kid wanted me to go down alleys
and go "sst" and tell American boys that I knew where there were some
girls. "Then I bring them to my room, sst, no gurls!" said the
Mexican kid. The only place I could shake
him was at the border gate. We waved goodbye.
But it was the evil city and I had my virtuous desert waiting for me.
I walked
anxiously over the border and through El Paso and out to the
railroad station, got my bag out, heaved a big sigh, and went right on down those
three miles to the arroyo, which was easy to re-recognize in the moonlight, and
on up, my feet making that lonely thwap thwap of Japhy's boots and I realized I had indeed learned from Japhy
how to cast off the evils of the
world and the city and find my true pure soul, just as long as I had a decent pack on my back. I got back to my camp
and spread the sleeping bag and thanked the Lord for all He was giving me. Now
the remembrance of the whole long evil
afternoon smoking marijuana with slant-hatted Mexicans in a musty candlelit
room was like a dream, a bad dream,
157
like one of my dreams on the straw mat at Buddha Creek
North Carolina. I meditated and prayed. There just isn't any kind of night's
sleep in the world that can compare with the night's sleep you get in the
desert winter night, providing you're good
and warm in a duck-down bag. The silence is so intense that you can
hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the
mysterious roar which I always identify
with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence
itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth. I wished I could
explain it to those I loved, to my mother, to Japhy, but there just
weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there
a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was
the question probably asked to beetlebrowed snowy
Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.
In the morning I had to get the
show on the road or never get to my protective
shack in California. I had about eight dollars left of the cash I'd
brought with me. I went down to the highway
and started to hitchhike, hoping for quick luck. A salesman gave me a ride. He said "Three hundred and
158
sixty days out of the year we get bright sunshine here in
El Paso and my wife just bought a clothes
dryer!" He took me to Las Gruces New Mexico and there I walked
through the little town, following the highway, and came out on the other end and saw a big beautiful old tree and
decided to just lay my pack down and rest anyhow. "Since it's a
dream already ended, then I'm already in
California, then I've already decided to rest under that tree at
noon," which I did, on my back, even
napping awhile, pleasantly.
Then I got up and walked over the
railroad bridge, and just then a man saw me and said "How would you like to earn two
dollars an hour helping me move a piano?" I needed the money and said okay. We left my rucksack in his
moving storage room and went off in
his little truck, to a home in the outskirts of Las Gruces, where a lot
of nice middleclass people were chatting on the porch, and the man and I got
out of the truck with the handtruck and the pads and got the piano out, also a
lot of other furniture, then transported it to their new house and got that in
and that was that. Two hours, he gave me four dollars and I went into a
truckstop diner and had a royal meal and
was all set for that afternoon and night. Just then a car stopped,
driven by a big Texan with a sombrero, with a poor Mexican couple, young, in
the back seat, the girl carrying an infant, and he offered me a ride all the way to Los Angeles for ten dollars. I said "I'll give you all I can, which is
only four." "Well
goddammit come on anyway." He talked and talked and drove all night
straight through Arizona and the California desert and left me off in Los
Angeles a stone's throw from my railroad
yards at nine o'clock in the morning, and the only disaster was the poor
little Mexican wife had spilled
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some baby food on my rucksack on the
floor of the car and I wiped it off angrily. But they had been nice people. In fact,
driving through Arizona I'd explained a little Buddhism to them, specifically
karma, reincarnation, and they all seemed pleased
to hear the news.
"You mean other chance to
come back and try again?" asked the poor little Mexican, who was all
bandaged from a fight in Juarez the night
before.
"That's what they say."
"Well goddammit next time I
be born I hope I ain't who I am now."
And the big Texan, if anybody
better get another chance it was him: his stories all night long were about how
he slugged so-and-so for such-and-such, from what he said he had knocked enough men out to form Coxie's army
of avenged phantasmal grievers
crawling on to Texas-land. But I noticed he was more of a big fibber than anything else and didn't believe half his stories and stopped listening at
midnight. Now, nine a.m. in L.A., I walked to the railroad yards, had a cheap breakfast
of doughnuts and coffee in a bar sitting at the counter chatting with the
Italian bartender who wanted to know what I was doing with the big rucksack,
then I went to the yards and sat in the grass watching them make up the trains.
Proud of
myself because I used to be a brakeman I made the mistake of wandering around the
yards with my rucksack on my back chatting with the switchmen, asking about the
next local, and suddenly here came a great
big young cop with a gun swinging in
a holster on his hip, all done up like on TV the Sheriff of Cochise and Wyatt Earp, and giving me a steely look
through dark glasses orders me out of the yards. So he
l60
watches me as I go over the overpass
to the highway, standing there arms akimbo. Mad, I went back down the
highway and jumped over the railroad fence and lay flat in the grass
awhile. Then I sat
up and chewed grass, keeping low however, and waited.
Soon I heard a highball blow and I knew what train was ready and I climbed over cars to my train and
jumped on it as it was pulling out
and rode right out of the L.A. yards lying on my back with a grass stem in my mouth right under the unforgiving gaze of my policeman, who was now arms
akimbo for a different reason. In
fact he scratched his Head.
The local went to Santa Barbara
where again I went to the beach, had a swim
and some food over a fine woodfire in the sand, and came back to the
yards with plenty of time to catch the
Midnight Ghost. The Midnight Ghost is composed mainly of flatcars with truck trailers lashed on them by steel
cables. The huge wheels of the trucks are encased in woodblocks. Since I always lay my head down right by those woodblocks, it would be goodbye Ray if there ever
was a crash. I figured if it was my
destiny to die on the Midnight Ghost it was my destiny. I figured God had work for me to do yet. The Ghost
came right on schedule and I got on a flatcar, under a truck, spread out my
bag, stuck my shoes under my balled coat
for a pillow, and relaxed and sighed. Zoom, we were gone. And now I know
why the bums call it the Midnight Ghost, because,
exhausted, against all better judgment, I fell fast asleep and only woke
up under the glare of the yard office lights in San Luis Obispo, a very
dangerous situation, the train had stopped just in the wrong way. But there
wasn't a soul in sight around the yard
office, it was mid of night, besides just then, as I woke up from a perfect dreamless sleep the highball was going baugh baugh up front and we were already
pulling
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out, exactly like ghosts. And I didn't wake up then till
almost San Francisco
in the morning. I had a dollar left and Gary was waiting for me at the shack.
The whole trip had been as swift and
enlightening as a dream, and I was back.
If the
Dharma Bums ever get lay brothers in America who live normal lives with wives
and children and homes, they will be like Sean Monahan.
Sean was a young carpenter who
lived in an old wooden house far up a country road from the huddled cottages of
Corte Madera, drove an old jalopy,
personally added a porch to the back
of the house to make a nursery for later children, and had selected a wife who
agreed with him in every detail about how
to live the joyous life in America without much money. Sean liked to take days off from his job to just
go up the hill to the shack, which belonged to the property he rented,
and spend a day of meditation and study of the Buddhist sutras and just brewing himself pots of tea and taking
naps. His wife was Christine, a beautiful young honey-haired girl, her
hair falling way down over her shoulders, who wandered around the house and yard barefooted hanging up wash and
baking her own brown bread and
cookies. She was an expert on making food
out of nothing. The year before Japhy had made them an
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anniversary gift which was a huge
ten-pound bag of flour, and they were very glad to receive it. Sean in
fact was just an old-time patriarch; though he was only twenty-two he wore a
full beard like Saint Joseph and in it you could see his pearly white teeth
smiling and his young blue eyes twinkling. They already had two little daughters, who
also wandered around barefooted in the house and yard and were brought up to
take care of themselves. Sean's house had
woven straw mats on the floor and there too when you came in you were
required to take off your shoes. He had
lots of books and the only extravagance
was a hi-fi set so he could play his fine collection of Indian records and Flamenco records and jazz. He
even had Chinese and Japanese
records. The dining table was a low, black-lacquered, Japanese style table, and
to eat in Sean's house you not only had to be in your socks but sitting
on mats at this table, any way you could.
Christine was a great one for delicious
soups and fresh biscuits.
When I arrived there at noon that
day, getting off the Greyhound bus and walking up the tar road about a mile,
Christine immediately had me sit down to hot soup and hot bread with butter. She was a gentle creature.
"Sean and Japhy are both working on his job at Sausalito. They'll
be home about five."
"I'll
go up to the shack and look at it and wait up there this afternoon."
"Well, you can stay down here and play
records." "Well, I'll get out of your way."
"You
won't be in my way, all I'm gonna do is hang out the wash and
bake some bread for tonight and mend a few things." With a wife like that Sean,
working only desultorily at carpentry, had managed to put a few thousand
dollars in the
163
bank. And like a patriarch of old
Sean was generous, he always insisted on feeding you and if twelve people
were in the house he'd
lay out a big dinner (a simple dinner but delicious) on a board outside in the yard, and always a big jug of
red wine. It was a communal arrangement, though, he was strict about that: we'd make collections for the wine, and if
people came, as they all did, for a long weekend, they were expected to bring
food or food money. Then at night under the trees and the stars of his yard,
with everybody well fed and drinking red
wine, Sean would take out his guitar and sing folksongs. Whenever I got tired of it I'd climb my hill and
go sleep. After eating
lunch and talking awhile to Christine, I went up the hill. It climbed steeply
right at the back door. Huge ponderosas and other pines, and in the property
adjoining Sean's a dreamy horse meadow with wild flowers and two beautiful bays
with their sleek necks bent to the butterfat grass in the hot sun. "Boy,
this is going to be greater than North Carolina woods!" I thought,
starting up. In the slope of grass was
where Sean and Japhy had felled three huge eucalyptus trees and had already bucked them (sawed whole logs) with a chain saw. Now the block was set and I
could see where they had begun to
split the logs with wedges and sledgehammers and doublebitted axes. The
little trail up the hill went so steeply that you almost had to lean over and
walk like a monkey. It followed a long
cypress row that had been planted by the old man who had died on the hill a few
years ago. This prevented the cold
foggy winds from the ocean from blasting across the property unhindered.
There were three stages to the climb: Sean's
backyard; then a fence, forming a little pure deer park where I actually
saw deer one night, five of them, resting (the whole area was a game refuge);
then the final
164
fence and the top grassy hill with its sudden hollow on the
right where the shack was barely visible
under trees and flowery bushes. Behind the shack, a well-built affair
actually of three big rooms but only one room occupied by Japhy, was plenty of good firewood and a saw horse and axes
and an outdoor privy with no roof, just a hole in the ground and a board. It was like the first morning in the world
in fine yard, with the sun streaming
in through the dense sea of leaves, and birds and butterflies jumping around, warm, sweet, the smell of
higher-hill heathers and flowers beyond the barbed-wire fence which led to the
very top of the mountain and showed you a vista of all the Marin County area. I
went inside the shack.
On the door was a board with
Chinese inscriptions on it; I never did find
out what it meant: probably "Mara stay away" (Mara the
Tempter). Inside I saw the beautiful simplicity of Japhy's way of living, neat,
sensible, strangely rich without a cent having been spent on the decoration.
Old clay jars exploded with bouquets of flowers picked around the yard. His
books were neatly stacked in orange crates. The floor was covered with
inexpensive straw mats. The walls, as I say,
were lined with burlap, which is one of the finest wallpapers you can have, very attractive and nice
smelling. Japhy's mat was covered with a thin mattress and a Paisley shawl over
that, and at the head of it, neatly
rolled for the day, his sleeping
bag. Behind burlap drapes in a closet his rucksack and junk were put away from sight. From the burlap wall
hung beautiful prints of old Chinese silk paintings and maps of Marin
County and northwest Washington and various poems he'd written and just stuck
on a nail for anybody to read. The latest poem superimposed over others on the
nail said: "It
165
started just now with a hummingbird stopping over the porch
two yards away through the open door, then gone, it stopped me studying and I saw the old redwood post leaning in clod ground, tangled in a huge bush of yellow
flowers higher than my head, through
which I push every time I come inside. The shadow network of the
sunshine through its vines. White-crowned sparrows make tremendous singings in
the trees, the rooster down the valley crows
and crows. Sean Monahan outside,
behind my back, reads the Diamond Sutra in the sun. Yesterday I read Migration of Birds. The Golden Plover and
the Arctic Tern, today that big abstraction's at my door, for juncoes and the robins soon will leave, and
nesting scrabblers will pick up all the string, and soon in hazy day of April summer heat across the hill, without a book I'll know,
the seabirds'll chase spring north along the coast: they'll be nesting in Alaska in six weeks." And it was signed:
"Japheth M. Ryder, Cypress-Cabin,
18:III: 56."
I didn't want to disturb anything
in the house till he got back from work so I went out and lay down in the tall
green grass in the sun and waited all
afternoon, dreaming. But then I
realized, "I might as well make a nice supper for Japhy" and I
went down the hill again and down the road to the store and bought beans, saltpork, various groceries and came back and
lit a fire in the woodstove and boiled up a good pot of New England beans, with molasses and onions. I was amazed at the
way Japhy stored his food: just on a shelf by the woodstove: two onions, an orange, a bag of wheat germ, cans of curry
powder, rice, mysterious pieces of dried Chinese seaweed, a bottle of soy sauce
(to make his mysterious Chinese dishes).
His salt and pepper was all neatly wrapped up in little plastic wrappers
bound with elastic. There wasn't any-
166
thing in the world Japhy would ever
waste, or lose. Now I was introducing into his kitchen all the big substantial
pork-and-beans of the world, maybe he wouldn't like it. He also had a big chunk of Christine's fine brown bread, and
his bread knife was a dagger simply stuck into the board.
It got dark and I waited in the
yard, letting the pot of beans keep warm on
the fire. I chopped some wood and added it to the pile behind the stove. The fog began to blow in from the
Pacific, the trees bowed deeply and roared. From the top of the hill you could
see nothing but trees, trees, a roaring sea of trees. It was paradise. As it
got cold I went inside and stoked up the
fire, singing, and closed the windows. The windows were simply
removable opaque plastic pieces that had been cleverly carpentered by Whitey
Jones, Christine's brother, they let in light but you couldn't see anything outdoors and they cut off the cold wind. Soon it was
warm in the cozy cabin. By and by I
heard a "Hoo" out in the roaring sea of fog trees and it was Japhy coming back.
I went out
to greet him. He was coming across the tall final grass, weary
from the day's work, clomping along in his boots, his coat
over his back. "Well, Smith, here you are."
"I cooked up a nice pot of beans for you."
"You did?" He was
tremendously grateful. "Boy, what a relief to come home from work and
don't have to cook up a meal yourself. I'm starved." He pitched right into
the beans with bread and hot coffee I made in a pan on the stove, just French
style brewing coffee stirred with a spoon. We had a great supper and then lit
up our pipes and talked with the fire
roaring. "Ray, you're going to have a great summer up on that Desolation Peak. I'll tell you all about
it."
"I'm gonna have a great spring right here in this
shack."
167
"Durn right, first thing we
do this weekend is invite some nice new girls I know, Psyche and Polly
Whitmore, though wait a minute, hmm. I can't invite both of them they both love me and'll be jealous. Anyway we'll have big
parties every weekend, starting downstairs at Sean's and ending up here.
And I'm not workin tomorrow so we'll cut
some firewood for Sean. That's all he wants you to do. Though, if you
wanta work on that job of ours in Sausalito
next week, you can make ten bucks a
day."
"Fine
. . . that'll buy a lotta pork and beans and wine."
Japhy pulled
out a fine brush drawing of a mountain. "Here's your mountain that'll loom over
you, Hozomeen. I drew it myself two summers
ago from Crater Peak. In nineteen-fifty-two I first went into that
Skagit country, hitched from Frisco to Seattle and then in, with a beard just
started and a bare shaved head—"
"Bare shaved head! Why?"
"To be like a bhikku, you know what it says in the
sutras."
"But what did people think
about you hitchhiking around with a bare shaved
head?"
"They thought I was crazy,
but everybody that gave me a ride I'd spin
'em the Dharmy, boy, and leave 'em enlightened."
"I shoulda done a bit of
that myself hitchin out here just now. ...
I gotta tell you about my arroyo in the desert mountains."
"Wait a minute, so they put
me on Crater Mountain lookout but the snow was so deep in the high country
that year I worked trail for a month first in Granite Creek gorge, you'll see all those places, and then with a string of
mules we made it the final seven
miles of winding Tibetan rocktrail above timber line over snowfields to the final jagged pinnacles, and then
168
climbed the cliffs in a snowstorm and
I opened my cabin and cooked
my first dinner while the wind howled and the ice grew on two walls in the wind. Boy, wait'll you get up there. That
year my friend Jack Joseph was on Desolation, where you'll be."
"What a name, Desolation, oo, wow, ugh, wait . .
."
"He was the first lookout to
go up, I got him on my radio first off and
he welcomed me to the community of lookouts. Later I contacted other
mountains, see they give you a two-way radio, it's almost a ritual all the
lookouts chat and talk about bears they've seen or sometimes ask instructions
for how to bake muffins on a woodstove and
so on, and there we all were in a
high world talking on a net of wireless across hundreds of miles of wilderness. It's a primitive
area, where you're going boy. From my cabin I could see the lamps of Desolation
after dark, Jack Joseph reading his geology books and in the day we flashed by mirror to align our firefinder
transits, accurate to the
compass."
"Gee, how'll I ever learn
all that, I'm just a simple poet bum."
"Oh you'll learn, the
magnetic pole, the pole star and the northern lights. Every night Jack Joseph
and I talked: one day he got a swarm of ladybugs on the lookout that covered
the roof and filled up his water cistern, another day he went for a walk along
the ridge and stepped right on a sleeping bear."
"Oho, I thought this place was wild."
"This is nothin . . . and
when the lightning storm came by, closer and
closer, he called to finally say he was going off the air because the storm was too close to leave
his radio on, he disappeared from
sound and then sight as the black clouds
169
swept over and the lightning danced on his hill. But as the
summer passed Desolation got dry and flowery and Blakey lambs and he wandered the cliffs and I was on Crater Mountain in
my jockstrap and boots hunting out ptarmigan nests out of curiosity, climbing
and pooking about, gettin bit by bees. . . . Desolation's way up there, Ray,
six thousand feet or so up looking into
Canada and the Chelan highlands, the wilds of the Pickett range, and mountains like Challenger, Terror, Fury, Despair
and the name of your own ridge is Starvation Ridge and the upcountry of the Boston Peak and Buckner Peak range to the south thousands of miles of mountains,
deer, bear, conies, hawks, trout,
chipmunks. It'll be great for you Ray." "I look forward to it okay. I bet no bee bites me." Then he took out his books and read awhile, and I
read too, both of us with separate oil lamps banked low, a quiet evening
at home as the foggy wind roared in the trees outside and across the valley a mournful mule heehawed in one of the most tremendously heartbroken cries I've ever
heard. "When that mule weeps like that," says Japhy, "I
feel like praying for all sentient beings." Then for a while he meditated
motionless in the full lotus position on his mat and then said "Well,
time for bed." But now I wanted to tell him all the things I'd discovered
that winter meditating in the woods. "Ah,
it's just a lot of words," he said, sadly, surprising me. "I don't
wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions." Japhy had changed since the year
before, too. He no longer had his
goatee, which had removed the funny merry little look of his face but left him looking gaunt and rocky faced. Also he'd cut his hair in a close crew cut and
looked Germanic and stern and above
all sad. There seemed to be some kind of
I70
disappointment in his face now, and certainly in his soul,
he wouldn't listen to my eager explanations
that everything was all right forever and forever and forever. Suddenly
he said "I'm gonna get married, soon, I think, I'm gettin tired of battin around like this."
"But I thought you'd
discovered the Zen ideal of poverty and
freedom."
"Aw maybe I'm gettin tired of all that. After I come
back from the monastery in Japan I'll probably have my fill of it anyhow. Maybe I'll be rich and work and make a
lot of money and live in a big
house." But a minute later: "And who wants to enslave himself to a lot of all that, though? I
dunno, Smith, I'm just depressed and everything you're saying just depresses me further. My sister's back in town you
know."
"Who's that?"
"That's Rhoda, my sister, I
grew up with her in the woods in Oregon. She's gonna marry this rich jerk from
Chicago, a real square. My father's having trouble with his sister, too, my Aunt Noss. She's an old bitch from way
back."
"You shouldn't have cut off
your goatee, you used to look like a happy
little sage."
"Well I ain't happy little sage
no mo' and I'm tired." He was exhausted from a long hard day's work. We decided to go to sleep and
forget it. In fact we were a bit sad and sore at each other. During the day I had discovered a spot by a wild rosebush in the yard where I planned to lay out my
sleeping bag. I'd covered it a foot deep with fresh pulled grass. Now,
with my flashlight and my bottle of cold water from the sink tap, I went out
there and rolled into a beautiful night's rest under the sighing trees, meditating awhile first. I couldn't meditate indoors any more like Japhy had just done, after
all that winter
171
in the woods of night I had to hear
the little sounds of animals and birds and feel the cold sighing earth under me before I could rightly get to feel a kinship with all
living things as being empty and
awake and saved already. I prayed for Japhy: it
looked like he was changing for the worse. At dawn a little
fain pattered on my sleeping bag and I put
my poncho over me instead of under me, cursing, and slept on. At seven
in the morning the sun was out and the
butterflies were in the roses
by my head and a hummingbird did a jet dive right down at
me, whistling, and darted away happily. But I was mistaken about Japhy changing. It was one of the greatest
mornings in our lives. There he was standing in the doorway of the shack with
a big frying pan in his hand banging on it and chanting "Buddham saranam gocchami . . . Dhammam saranam gocchami . . . Sangham saranam gocchami" and
yelling "Come on, boy, your pancakes are ready! Come and get it!
Bang bang bang" and the orange sun was pouring in through the pines and everything was fine again, in fact Japhy had
contemplated that night and decided I
was right about hewing to the good old Dharma.
Japhy had
cooked up some good buckwheat pancakes and we had Log Cabin syrup to go with
them and a little butter. I asked him what the "Gocchami" chant
meant. "That's
172
the chant they give out for the three
meals in Buddhist monasteries
in Japan. It means, Buddham Saranam Gocchami, I take refuge in the Buddha,
Sangham, I take refuge in the church, Dhammam, I take refuge in the Dharma, the
truth. Tomorrow morning I'll make you
another nice breakfast, slum-gullion,
d'yever eat good oldfashioned slumgullion boy, 'taint nothin but scrambled eggs and potatoes all
scrambled up together."
"It's a lumberjack meal?"
"There ain't no such thing as
lumberjack, that must be a Back
East expression. Up here we call 'em loggers. Come on eat up your
pancakes and we'll go down and split logs and I'll show you how to handle a
doublebitted ax." He took the ax out
and sharpened it and showed me how to sharpen it. "And don't ever use this ax on a piece of wood that's
on the ground, you'll hit rocks and
blunt it, always have a log or sumpthin for a block."
I went out to the privy and,
coming back, wishing to surprise Japhy with a Zen trick I threw the roll of
toilet paper through the open window and he
let out a big Samurai Warrior roar and appeared on the windowsill in
his boots and shorts with a dagger in his
hand and jumped fifteen feet down into the loggy yard. It was crazy. We started
downhill feeling high. All the logs
that had been bucked had more or less of a crack in them, where you more or less inserted the heavy iron wedge, and then, raising a five-pound sledgehammer
over your head, standing way back so's not to hit your own ankle, you
brought it down konko on the wedge and split the log clean in half. Then you'd sit the half-logs up on a
block-log and let down with the
doublebitted ax, a long beautiful ax, sharp as a razor, and fawap, you
had quarter-logs. Then you set up a
173
quarter-log and brought down to an eighth. He showed me how
to swing the sledge and the ax, not too hard, but when he got mad himself I
noticed he swung the ax as hard as he could,
roaring his famous cry, or cursing. Pretty soon I had the knack and was going along as though I'd been doing
it all my life.
Christine came out in the yard to
watch us and called "I'll have some
nice lunch for ya."
"Okay." Japhy and Christine were like brother
and sister.
We split a lot of logs. It was great swinging down the
sledgehammer, all the weight clank on top of a wedge and feeling that log give,
if not the first time the second time. The
smell of sawdust, pine trees, the breeze blowing over the • placid mountains
from the sea, the meadowlarks singing, the butterflies in the grass, it
was perfect. Then we went in and ate a good
lunch of hotdogs and rice and soup and red wine and Christine's fresh biscuits and sat there
crosslegged and barefoot thumbing
through Sean's vast library.
"Did ya hear about the
disciple who asked the Zen master 'What is
the Buddha?' "
"No, what?"
" 'The
Buddha is a dried piece of turd,' was the answer. The disciple
experienced sudden enlightenment."
"Simple shit," I said.
"Do you
know what sudden enlightenment is? One disciple came to a Master and answered his koan and the Master hit
him with a stick and knocked him off the veranda ten feet into a mud puddle. The disciple got up and
laughed. He later became a Master himself. 'Twasn't by words he was enlightened,
but by that great healthy push off the porch."
"All
wallowing in mud to prove the crystal truth of com-
174
passion," I thought, I wasn't about to start
advertising my "words" out loud
any more to Japhy.
"Woo!"
he yelled throwing a flower at my head. "Do you know how
Kasyapa became the First Patriarch? The Buddha was about to start expounding a sutra and twelve hundred and fifty bhikkus were waiting with their garments
arranged and their feet crossed, and all the Buddha did was raise a
flower. Everybody was perturbed. The Buddha didn't say nothin. Only Kasyapa smiled. That was how the Buddha selected Kasyapa. That's known as the flower sermon,
boy."
I went in the kitchen and got a
banana and came out and said, "Well,
I'll tell you what nirvana is."
"What?"
I ate the
banana and threw the peel away and said nothing. "That's the banana sermon."
"Hoo!"
yelled Japhy. "D'l ever tell you about Coyote Old Man and how
him and Silver Fox started the world by stomping in empty space till a little
ground appeared beneath their feet? Look at this picture, by the way. This is the famous
Bulls." It was an ancient Chinese cartoon showing first a young boy going
out into the wilderness with a small staff and
pack, like an American Nat Wills tramp of 1905, and in later panels he
discovers an ox, tries to tame, tries to ride it, finally does tame it and ride
it but then abandons the ox and just
sits in the moonlight meditating, finally you see him coming down from the mountain of enlightenment and
then suddenly the next panel shows
absolutely nothing at all, followed by
a panel showing blossoms in a tree, then the last picture you see the young boy is a big fat old laughing
wizard with a huge bag on his back and he's going into the city to get
drunk
175
with the butchers, enlightened, and another new young boy
is going up to the mountain with a little pack and staff.
"It goes on and on, the disciples and the Masters go
through the same thing, first they have to find and tame the ox of their mind essence, and then
abandon that, then finally they attain to nothing, as represented by this empty
panel, then having attained nothing they attain everything which is springtime
blossoms in the trees so they end up coming down to the city to get drunk with
the butchers like Li Po." That was a
very wise cartoon, it reminded me of my own experience, trying to tame
my mind in the woods, then realizing it was
all empty and awake and I didn't have to do anything, and now I was
getting drunk with the butcher Japhy. We played records and lounged around
smoking then went out and cut more wood.
Then as it got cool late
afternoon we went up to the shack and washed and dressed up for the big
Saturday night party. During the day Japhy went up and down the hill at least ten times to make phone calls and see Christine
and get bread and bring up sheets for
his girl that night (when he had a girl he put out clean sheets on his
thin mattress on the straw mats, a ritual). But I just sat around in the grass
doing nothing, or writing haikus, or watching the old vulture circling the hill. "Must be something dead around
here," I figured.
Japhy said "Why do you sit on your ass all
day?"
"I practice do-nothing."
"What's
the difference? Burn it, my Buddhism is activity," said Japhy rushing off
down the hill again. Then I could hear him sawing wood and whistling in the distance. He couldn't
stop jiggling for a minute. His meditations were regular
176
things, by the clock, he'd meditated first thing waking in
the morning then he had his mid-afternoon meditation, only about three minutes
long, then before going to bed and that was that. But I just ambled and dreamed
around. We were two strange dissimilar monks
on the same path. I took a shovel, however, and leveled the ground near
the rosebush where my bed of grass was: it
was a little too slanty for comfort: I fixed it just right and that
night I slept well after the big wine
party.
The big
party was wild. Japhy had a girl called Polly Whit-more come
out to see him, a beautiful brunette with a Spanish hairdo and
dark eyes, a regular raving beauty actually, a mountainclimber too. She'd just been
divorced and lived alone in Millbrae. And Christine's brother Whitey Jones
brought his fiancee Patsy. And of course
Sean came home from work and cleaned up for the party. Another guy came out for
the weekend, big blond Bud Diefendorf who worked as the janitor in the
Buddhist Association to earn his rent and attend classes free, a big mild pipesmoking Buddha with all
kinds of strange ideas. I liked Bud,
he was intelligent, and I liked the fact that he had started out as a physicist
at the University of Chicago then gone from that to philosophy and finally now
to philosophy's dreadful murderer, Buddha.
He said "I had a dream one time
that I was sitting under a tree picking on a lute and singing 'I ain't got no
name.' I was the no-name bhikku." It was so pleasing to meet so many
Buddhists after that harsh road
hitchhiking.
Sean was a strange mystical
Buddhist with a mind full of superstitions
and premonitions. "I believe in devils," he said.
"Well," I said,
stroking his little daughter's hair, "all little children know that
everybody goes to Heaven" to which he
177
assented tenderly with a sad nod of
his bearded skull. He was very kind. He kept saying "Aye" all the time, which went
with his old boat that was anchored out in the bay and kept being scuttled by
storms and we had to row out and bail it out in the cold gray fog. Just a
little old wreck of a boat about twelve feet long, with no cabin to speak of,
nothing but a ragged hull floating in the
water around a rusty anchor. Whitey Jones, Christine's brother, was a
sweet young kid of twenty who never said
anything and just smiled and took ribbings without complaint. For
instance the party finally got pretty wild and the three couples took all their
clothes off and danced a kind of quaint innocent polka all hand-in-hand around the parlor, as the kiddies slept in their
cribs. This didn't disturb Bud and me at all, we went right on smoking
our pipes and discussing Buddhism in the corner, in fact that was best because
we didn't have girls of our own. And those were three well stacked nymphs
dancing there. But Japhy and Sean dragged Patsy into the bedroom and pretended
to be trying to make her, to bug Whitey, who blushed all red, stark naked, and there were wrestlings and laughs
all around the house. Bud and I were sitting there crosslegged with
naked dancing girls in front of us and laughed to realize that it was a mighty familiar occasion.
"Seems
like in some previous lifetime, Ray," said Bud, "you and I were
monks in some monastery in Tibet where the girls danced for us before yabyum."
"Yeh, and we were the old
monks who weren't interested in sex any more but Sean and Japhy and Whitey were
the young monks and were still full of the
fire of evil and still had a lot to learn." Every now and then Bud
and I looked at all that flesh and licked our lips in secret. But most of the
time,
178
actually, during these naked revels,
I just kept my eyes closed and listened to the music: I was really sincerely keeping lust out
of my mind by main force and gritting of my teeth. And the best way was to keep my eyes closed. In spite of the nakedness
and all it was really a gentle little home party and everybody began yawning for time for bed. Whitey went off with
Patsy, Japhy went up the hill with Polly and took her to his fresh sheets, and
I unrolled my sleeping bag by the rosebush
and slept. Bud had brought his own sleeping bag and rolled out on Sean's straw mat floor.
In the morning Bud came up and lit his pipe and sat in the
grass chatting to me as I rubbed my eyes to waking. During the day, Sunday, all kinds of other people came
calling on the Monahans and half of
them came up the hill to see the pretty shack and the two crazy famous
bhikkus Japhy and Ray. Among them were
Princess, Alvah, and Warren Coughlin. Sean spread out a board in the
yard and put out a royal table of wine and
hamburgers and pickles and lit a big bonfire and took out his two guitars and
it was really a magnificent kind of way to live in Sunny California, I realized, with all this fine Dharma connected
with it, and mountainclimbing, all of them had rucksacks and sleeping bags and some of them were going hiking that next day on the Marin County trails,
which are beautiful. So the party was divided into three parts all the
time: those in the living room listening to the hi-fi or thumbing through
books, those in the yard eating and listening to the guitar music, and those on
the hilltop in the shack brewing pots of tea and sitting crosslegged discussing
poetry and things and the Dharma or wandering around in the high meadow to go
see the children fly kites or old ladies ride by on horseback. Every weekend
was the same mild picnic,
179
a regular classical scene of angels and dolls having a kind
flowery time in the void like the void in the cartoon of the Bulls, the blossom branch.
Bud and I sat on the hill
watching kites. "That kite won't go
high enough, it hasn't got a long enough tail," I said.
Bud said, "Say, that's
great, that reminds me of my main problem
in my meditations. The reason why I can't get really high into nirvana
is because my tail isn't long enough." He puffed and pondered seriously over this. He was the most serious
guy in the world. He pondered it all night and the next morning said "Last
night I saw myself as a fish swimming through the void of the sea, going left
and right in the water without knowing the meaning of left and right, but
because of my fin I did so, that is, my kite
tail, so I'm a Buddhafish and my fin
is my wisdom."
"That
was pretty infinyte, that kyte," says I.
Throughout
all these parties I always stole off for a nap under the
eucalyptus trees, instead of by my rosebush, which was all hot sun
all day; in the shade of the trees I rested well. One afternoon as I just gazed at the
topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the
uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been
apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree
swaying beneath them making their dance,
their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in
the void dancing the meaning of the tree. I noticed how the leaves
almost looked human the way they bowed and then leaped up and then swayed
lyrically side to side. It was a crazy vision in my mind but beautiful. Another
time under those trees I dreamt I saw a
purple throne all covered with gold, some kind
l80
of Eternity Pope or Patriarch in it, and Rosie somewhere,
and at that moment Cody was in the shack yakking to some guys and it seemed
that he was to the left of this vision as some kind of Archangel, and when I
opened my eyes I saw it was only the sun against my eyelids. And as I say, that
hummingbird, a beautiful little blue hummingbird no bigger than a dragonfly,
kept making a whistling jet dive at me, definitely saying hello to me, every day, usually in the morning, and I always
yelled back at him a greeting. Finally he began to hover in the open window of
the shack, buzzing there with his furious wings, looking at me beadily, then,
flash, he was gone. That California humming guy . . .
Though sometimes I was afraid he
would drive right into my head with his long beaker like a hatpin. There was
also an old rat scrambling in the cellar under the shack and it was a good
thing to keep the door closed at night. My other great friends were the ants, a
colony of them that wanted to come in the shack and find the honey
("Calling all ants, calling all ants, come and get your ho-ney!" sang
a little boy one day in the shack), so I went out to their anthill and made a
trail of honey leading them into the back garden, and they were at that new
vein of joy for a week. I even got down on my knees and talked to the ants.
There were beautiful flowers all around the shack, red, purple, pink, white, we
kept making bouquets but the prettiest of all was the one Japhy made of just
pine cones and a sprig of pine needles. It had that simple look that
characterized all his life. He'd come barging into the shack with his saw and
see me sitting there and say "Why did you sit around all day?"
"I
am the Buddha known as the Quitter."
Then
it would be when Japhy's face would crease up in that
l8l
funny littleboy laugh of his, like a Chinese boy laughing,
crow's tracks appearing on each side of his eyes and his long mouth cracking
open. He was so pleased with me sometimes.
Everybody
loved Japhy, the girls Polly and Princess and even married Christine were all madly
in love with him and they were all secretly jealous of Japhy's favorite doll
Psyche, who came the following weekend real cute in jeans and a little white
collar falling over her black turtleneck sweater and a tender little body and
face. Japhy had told me he was a bit in love with her himself. But he had a
hard time convincing her to make love he had to get her drunk, once she got
drinking she couldn't stop. That weekend she came Japhy made slumgullion for
all the three of us in the shack then we borrowed Sean's jalopy and drove about
a hundred miles up the seacoast to an isolated beach where we picked mussels
right off the washed rocks of the sea and smoked them in a big woodfire covered
with seaweed. We had wine and bread and cheese and Psyche spent the whole day
lying on her stomach in her jeans and sweater, saying nothing. But once she
looked up with her little blue eyes and said "How oral you are, Smith,
you're always eating and drinking."
"I am Buddha Empty-Eat," I said.
"Ain't
she cute?" said Japhy.
"Psyche," I said,
"this world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of
the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything
is."
"Ah
boloney."
We ran around the beach. At one
point Japhy and Psyche were hiking up ahead on the beach and I was walking
alone whistling Stan Getz's "Stella" and a couple of beautiful girls
up front with their boyfriends heard me and one girl turned
182
and said "Swing." There were natural caves on
that beach where Japhy had once brought big
parties of people and had organized
naked bonfire dances.
Then the
weekdays would come again and the parties were over and Japhy and I would sweep out
the shack, wee dried bums dusting small temples. I still had a little left of
my grant from last fall, in traveler's checks, and I took one and went to the
supermarket down on the highway and bought flour, oatmeal, sugar,
molasses, honey, salt, pepper, onions, rice, dried milk,
bread, beans, black-eyed peas, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, coffee, big wood matches
for our woodstove and came staggering back
up the hill with all that and a half-gallon of red port. Japhy's neat little spare foodshelf was suddenly loaded with too much food. "What we
gonna do with all this? We'll have
to feed all the bhikkus." In due time we had more bhikkus than we could handle: poor drunken
Joe Ma-honey, a friend of mine from
the year before, would come out and
sleep for three days and recuperate for another crack at North Beach and
The Place. I'd bring him his breakfast in bed.
On weekends sometimes there'd be twelve guys in the shack all arguing and yakking and I'd take some
yellow corn meal and mix it with
chopped onions and salt and water and pour
out little johnnycake tablespoons in the hot frying pan (with oil) and provide the whole gang with
delicious hots to go with their tea.
In the Chinese Book of Changes a year ago I had tossed a couple of pennies to
see what the prediction of my
fortune was and it had come out, "You will feed others." In fact I was always standing over a hot stove.
"What does it mean that
those trees and mountains out there are not
magic but real?" I'd yell, pointing outdoors.
"What? "they'd say.
183
"It means that those trees
and mountains out there are not magic but
real."
"Yeah?"
Then I'd say, "What does it
mean that those trees and mountains aren't
real at all, just magic?"
"Oh come on."
"It means that those trees
and mountains aren't real at all, just
magic."
"Well
which is it, goddammit!"
"What
does it mean that you ask, well which is it goddammit?"
I yelled.
"Well what?"
"It means that you ask well which is it
goddammit."
"Oh go
bury your head in your sleeping bag, bring me a cup of that hot
coffee." I was always boiling big pots of coffee on the stove.
"Oh
cut it out," yelled Warren Coughlin. "The chariot will wear
down!"
One
afternoon I was sitting with some children in the grass and they
asked me "Why is the sky blue?"
"Because the sky is blue."
"I wanta know why the sky is blue."
"The sky is blue because you
wanta know why the sky is blue."
"Blue
blue you," they said.
There were
also some little kids who came around throwing rocks on our shack roof, thinking it
was abandoned. One afternoon, at the time when Japhy and I had a little jet-black cat,
they came sneaking to the door to look in. Just as they were about to open the
door I opened it, with the black cat in my arms,
and said in a low voice "I am the ghost."
184
They gulped and looked at me and
believed me and said "Yeah." Pretty soon they were over the other
side of the hill. They never came around throwing rocks again. They thought I was a witch for sure.
Plans were being made for Japhy's big farewell party a few days before his boat sailed for Japan.
He was scheduled to leave on a Japanese freighter. It was going to be
the biggest party of all time, spilling out of Sean's hi-fi living room right out into the bonfire yard and up the
hill and even over it. Japhy and I had had our fill of parties and were
not looking forward to it too happily. But everybody was going to be there: all
his girls, including Psyche, and the poet Ca-coethes,
and Coughlin, and Alvah, and Princess and her new boyfriend, and even the
director of the Buddhist Association Arthur
Whane and his wife and sons, and even Japhy's father, and of course Bud, and unspecified couples from
everywhere who would come with wine and food and guitars. Japhy said
"I'm gettin sick and tired of these parties. How about you and me taking
off for the Marin trails after the party, it'll
go on for days, we'll just bring our packs and take off for Potrero Meadows camp or Laurel Dell." "Good."
185
Meanwhile, suddenly one afternoon
Japhy's sister Rhoda appeared on the scene with her fiance. She was going to be
married in Japhy's father's house in Mill
Valley, big reception and all. Japhy and I were sitting around in the
shack in a drowsy afternoon and suddenly she
was in the door, slim and blond and
pretty, with her well-dressed Chicago fiance, a very handsome man. "Hoo!" yelled Japhy
jumping up and kissing her in a big passionate embrace, which she
returned wholeheartedly. And the way they talked!
"Well is your husband gonna be a good bang?"
"He
damn well is, I picked him out real careful, ya grunge-jumper!"
"He'd better be or you'll have to call on me!"
Then to show off Japhy started a
woodfire and said "Here's what we do up in that real country up
north," and dumped too much kerosene into the fire but ran away from the stove and waited like a mischievous little boy
and broom! the stove let out a deep rumbling explosion way inside
that I could feel the shock of clear across the room. He'd almost done it that
time. Then he said to her poor fiance "Well you know any good positions
for honeymoon night?" The poor guy had
just come back from being a serviceman in Burma and tried to talk about
Burma but couldn't get a word in edgewise.
Japhy was mad as hell and really jealous. He was invited to the fancy
reception and he said "Can I show up nekkid?"
"Anything
you want, but come."
"I can just see it now, the
punchbowl and all the ladies in their lawn
hats and the hi-fi playing hearts and flowers organ music and everybody
wipin their eyes cause the bride is so beautiful.
What you wanta get all involved in the middle class for, Rhoda?"
186
She said "Ah I don't care, I
wanta start living." Her fiance had a
lot of money. Actually he was a nice guy and I felt sorry for him having to smile through all this.
After they left Japhy said
"She won't stay with him more than six months. Rhoda's a real mad girl,
she'd rather put on jeans and go hiking
than sit around Chicago apartments."
"You
love her, don't you?"
"You
damn right, I oughta marry her myself."
"But
she's your sister."
"I
don't give a goddamn. She needs a real man like me. You don't know
how wild she is, you weren't brought up with her in the woods." Rhoda was real nice and I wished she
hadn't shown up with a fiance. In all this welter of women I still hadn't got
one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to
see everybody paired off and having a good
time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it
was just red wine in my mouth and a
pile of firewood.
But then I'd find something like
a dead crow in the deer park and think "That's a pretty sight for
sensitive human eyes, and all of it comes out of sex." So I put sex out of
my mind again. As long as the sun shined
then blinked and shined again, I was
satisfied. I would be kind and remain in solitude, I wouldn't pook about, I'd rest and be kind.
"Compassion is the guide star," said Buddha. "Don't
dispute with the authorities or with women.
Beg. Be humble." I wrote a pretty poem addressed to all the people
coming to the party: "Are in your eyelids wars, and silk . . . but the
saints are gone, all gone, safe to that other." I really thought myself a
kind of crazy saint. And it was based on
telling myself "Ray, don't run after liquor and excitement of women and talk, stay in your shack
187
and enjoy natural relationship of things as they are"
but it was hard to live up to this with all kinds of pretty broads coming up
the hill every weekend and even on weeknights. One time a beautiful brunette
finally consented to go up the hill with me and we were there in the dark on my
mattress day-mat when suddenly the door
burst open and Sean and Joe Mahoney
danced in laughing, deliberately trying to make me mad . . . either that
or they really believed in my effort at asceticism and were like angels coming
in to drive away the devil woman. Which they did, all right. Sometimes when I was really drunk and high and sitting crosslegged
in the midst of the mad parties I
really did see visions of holy empty snow in my eyelids and when I
opened them I'd see all these good friends sitting around waiting for me to
explain; and nobody ever considered my behavior strange, quite natural among
Buddhists; and whether I opened my eyes to explain something or not they were
satisfied. During that whole season, in
fact, I had an overwhelming urge to close my eyes in company. I think the
girls were terrified of this. "What's he always sitting with his eyes closed for?"
Little Prajna, Sean's
two-year-old daughter, would come and poke
at my closed eyelids and say "Booba. Hack!" Sometimes I preferred taking her for little magic
walks in the yard, holding her hand,
to sitting yakking in the living room.
As for Japhy
he was quite pleased with anything I did provided I didn't pull any boners like
making the kerosene lamp smoke from turning the wick too far up, or failing to
sharpen the ax properly. He was very stern on those subjects. "You've got to learn!" he'd say.
"Dammit, if there's anything I can't stand is when things ain't done
right." It was amazing the suppers he'd roust up out of his own part of
the food shelf,
188
all
kinds of weeds and dry roots bought in Chinatown and he'd boil up a mess of
stuff, just a little, with soy sauce, and that went on top of freshly boiled
rice and was delicious indeed, eaten with chopsticks. There we were sitting in
the roar of trees at dusk with our windows wide open still, cold, but going chomp-chomp on delicious home-made
Chinese dinners. Japhy really knew
how to handle chopsticks and shoveled
it in with a will. Then I'd sometimes wash the dishes and go out to
meditate awhile on my mat beneath the eucalypti, and in the window of the shack
I'd see the brown glow of Japhy's kerosene
lamp as he sat reading and picking his teeth. Sometimes he'd come to the door of the shack and yell "Hoo!" and
I wouldn't answer and I could hear him mutter "Where the hell is he?" and see him peering out
into the night for his bhikku. One night I was sitting meditating when I
heard a loud crack to my right and I looked
and it was a deer, coming to re-visit the ancient deer park and munch
awhile in the dry foliage. Across the
evening valley the old mule went with his heartbroken "Hee haw" broken like a yodel in the wind: like a
horn blown by some terribly sad
angel: like a reminder to people
digesting dinners at home that all was not as well as they thought. Yet
it was just a love cry for another mule. But that was why . . .
One night I was meditating in
such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes
came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there a long time
without biting and then went away without
biting.
189
A few days
before his big farewell party Japhy and I had an argument. We went into San
Francisco to deliver his bike to the freighter at the pier and then went up to Skid Row in
a drizzling rain to get cheap haircuts at the barber college and pook around Salvation Army and Goodwill stores in search of long underwear and stuff. As we were
walking in the drizzly exciting streets ("Reminds me of
Seattle!" he yelled) I got the overwhelming urge to get drunk and feel
good. I bought a poorboy of ruby port and uncapped it and dragged Japhy into an
alley and we drank. "You better not drink
too much," he said, "you know we gotta go to Berkeley after
this and attend a lecture and discussion at the Buddhist Center."
"Aw I don't wanta go to no
such thing, I just wanta drink in
alleys."
"But
they're expecting you, I read all your poems there last year."
"I
don't care. Look at that fog flyin over the alley and look at this warm ruby red port, don't
it make ya feel like singing in the wind?"
"No it doesn't. You know,
Ray, Cacoethes says you drink too
much."
190
"And
him with his ulcer! Why do you think he has an ulcer? Because he
drank too much himself. Do I have an ulcer? Not on your life!
I drink for joy! If you don't like my drinking you can go to
the lecture by yourself. I'll wait at Coughlin's cottage."
"But
you'll miss all that, just for some old wine."
"There's wisdom in wine,
goddam it!" I yelled. "Have a shot!"
"No I
won't!"
"Well then I'll drink
it!" and I drained the bottle and we went
back on Sixth Street where I immediately jumped back into the same store and bought another poorboy. I
was feeling fine now.
Japhy was
sad and disappointed. "How do you expect to become a good bhikku or even
a Bodhisattva Mahasattva always getting drunk like that?"
"Have you forgotten the last
of the Bulls, where he gets drunk with the
butchers?"
"Ah so what, how can you
understand your own mind essence with your
head all muddled and your teeth all stained and your belly all sick?"
"I'm
not sick, I'm fine. I could just float up into that gray fog and fly
around San Francisco like a seagull. D'l ever tell you about
Skid Row here, I used to live here—"
"I
lived on Skid Road in Seattle myself, I know all about all that."
The neons of stores and bars were
glowing in the gray gloom of rainy
afternoon, I felt great. After we had our haircuts we went into a
Goodwill store and fished around bins, pulling out socks and undershirts and
various belts and junk that we bought for a few pennies. I kept taking
surreptitious
191
slugs of wine out of my bottle which I had wedged in my
belt.
Japhy was disgusted. Then we got in the jalopy and drove to
Berkeley, across the rainy bridge, to the
cottages of Oakland and then downtown Oakland, where Japhy wanted to
find a pair of jeans that fitted me. We'd
been looking all day for used jeans
that would fit me. I kept giving him wine and finally he relented a little and drank some and showed me
the poem he had written while I was getting my haircut in Skid Row: "Modern
barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50
cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia'
on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears
watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be
true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches
me delicate, suffering child that
grows hard and greedy with puberty, Ray and I with poorboy of ruby port in us
rainy May day no used levis in this town, our size, and old barber
college t and g crappers skidrow haircuts middleage barber careers start out now flowering."
"See," I said,
"you wouldn't have even written that poem if it wasn't for the wine made you feel good!"
"Ah I would have written it
anyway. You're just drinking too much all the time, I don't see how you're even
going to gain enlightenment and manage to
stay out in the mountains, you'll always be coming down the hill
spending your bean money on wine and
finally you'll end up lying in the street in the rain, dead drunk, and
then they'll take you away and you'll have to be reborn a teetotalin bartender
to atone for your karma." He was really sad about it, and worried about me, but I just went on drinking.
192
When we got to Alvah's cottage
and it was time to leave for the Buddhist Center lecture I said "I'll just
sit here and get drunk and wait for
you."
"Okay," said Japhy, looking
at me darkly. "It's your life." He was gone for two hours. I felt sad and drank too much and was dizzy. But I was determined not to pass
out and stick it out and prove something to Japhy. Suddenly, at dusk, he
came running back into the cottage drunk as a hoot owl yelling "You know
what happened Smith? I went to the Buddhist lecture and they were all drinking
white raw saki out of teacups and everybody
got drunk. All those crazy Japanese saints! You were right! It doesn't make any
difference! We all got drunk and discussed prajna! It was great!"
And after that Japhy and I never had an
argument again.
The night of the big party came.
I could practically hear the hubbubs of preparation going on down the hill and felt depressed. "Oh my God, sociability
is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could
just stay up here and rest and be
kind." But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off.
That night the wine flowed down the
hill like a river. Sean had put together a lot of big logs for an immense bonfire in
193
the yard. It was a clear starry night, warm and pleasant,
in May. Everybody came. The party soon
became clearly divided into three parts again. I spent most of my time
in the living room where we had Cal Tjader
records on the hi-fi and a lot of girls
were dancing as Bud and I and Sean and sometimes Alvah and his new buddy
George played bongo drums on inverted cans.
Out in the
yard it was a quieter scene, with the glow of the fire and
lots of people sitting on the long logs Sean had placed around the fire, and on
the board a spread fit for a king and his hungry retinue. Here, by the fire, far from the freneticism
of the bongo-ing living room, Cacoethes
held forth discussing poetry with
the local wits, in tones about like this: "Marshall Dashiell is too
busy cultivating his beard and driving his Mercedes Benz around cocktail
parties in Chevy Chase and up Cleopatra's needle, O. O. Dowler is being carried
around Long Island in limousines and
spending his summers shrieking on St. Mark's Place, and Tough Shit Short
alas successfully manages to be a Savile Row fop with bowler and waistcoat, and as for Manuel Drubbing he just flips quarters
to see who'll flop in the little
reviews, and Omar Tott I got nothing to say. Albert Law Livingston is busy signing autograph copies of his novels and sending Christmas cards to Sarah
Vaughan; Ariadne Jones is importuned
by the Ford Company; Leontine McGee says
she's old, and who does that leave?"
"Ronald Firbank," said Coughlin.
"I guess the only real poets
in the country, outside the orbit of this little backyard, are Doctor Musial,
who's probably muttering behind his
living-room curtains right now, and Dee Sampson, who's too rich. That
leaves us dear old Japhy here who's going
away to Japan, and our wailing friend Gold-
194
book and our Mr. Coughlin, who has a
sharp tongue. By God, I'm
the only good one here. At least I've got an honest anarchist background. At
least I had frost on my nose, boots on my
feet, and protest in my mouth." He stroked his mustache.
"What about Smith?"
"Well I guess he's a
Bodhisattva in its frightful aspect, 'ts about
all I can say." (Aside, sneering: "He's too drrronk all the time.")
Henry
Morley also came that night, only for a short while, and acted very strange sitting in
the background reading Mad comic books and the new magazine called Hip, and
left early with the remark "The hotdogs are too thin, do you think that's a sign of the times or are Armour
and Swift using stray Mexicans you think?" Nobody talked to him except me and
Japhy. I was sorry to see him leave so soon, he was ungraspable as a ghost, as ever. Nevertheless he had worn a brand-new
brown suit for the occasion, and suddenly he was gone.
Up the hill
meanwhile, where the stars nodded on trees, occasional couples were sneaking up to neck or just brought
jugs of wine and guitars up and had separate little parties in our shack. It
was a great night. Japhy's father finally came, after work, and he was a
tight-built little tough guy just like Japhy, balding a little, but completely
energetic and crazy just like his son. He immediately began dancing wild mambos
with the girls while I beat madly on a can. "Go, man!" You never saw
a more frantic dancer: he stood there, bending
way back till he was almost falling over, moving his loins at the girl,
sweating, eager, grinning, glad, the maddest father I ever saw. Just recently
at his daughter's wedding he had broken up the lawn reception by rushing out on
his hands and knees with a tiger skin on his
back, snapping at the
195
ladies' heels and barking. Now he took
a tall almost sixfoot gal by the name of Jane and swung her around and
almost knocked over the bookcase. Japhy kept wandering to all sections
of the party with a big jug in his hand, his face beaming with happiness. For a
while the party in the living room emptied out the bonfire clique and soon Psyche
and Japhy were doing a mad dance, then Sean leaped up and whirled her around
and she made as if to swoon and fell right
in between Bud and me sitting on the
floor drumming (Bud and I who never had girls of our own and ignored everything), and lay there a second sleeping
on our laps. We puffed on our pipes and drummed on. Polly Whitmore kept hanging
around the kitchen helping Christine with the cooking and even turning out a
batch of delicious cookies of her own. I saw she was lonely because Psyche was there and Japhy wasn't hers so I went
over to grab her by the waist but she
looked at me with such fear I didn't do anything. She seemed to be terrified of me. Princess was there with
her new boyfriend and she too was pouting in a corner.
I said to Japhy "What the
hell you gonna do with all these broads?
Ain't you gonna give me one?"
"Take
whichever one you want. I'm neutral tonight."
I went out to the bonfire to hear
Cacoethes' latest witticisms. Arthur Whane
was sitting on a log, well dressed, necktie and suit, and I went over
and asked him "Well what is Buddhism?
Is it fantastic imagination magic of the lightning flash, is it plays, dreams, not even plays, dreams?"
"No, to
me Buddhism is getting to know as many people as possible." And there he was going around the party
real affable shaking hands with everybody and chatting, a regular cocktail
party. The party inside was getting more and more frantic. I began to dance
with the tall girl myself. She was
196
wild. I wanted to sneak her up on the hill with a jug but
her husband was there. Later in the night a crazy colored guy showed up and
began playing bongos on his own head and cheeks
and mouth and chest, whacking himself with real loud sounds, and a great
beat, a tremendous beat. Everybody was delighted
and declared he must be a Bodhisattva.
People of all kinds were pouring
in from the city, where news of the great party was going the rounds of our
bars. Suddenly I looked up and Alvah and George were walking around naked.
"What
are you doing?"
"Oh,
we just decided to take our clothes off."
Nobody seemed to mind. In fact I
saw Cacoethes and Arthur Whane well dressed
standing having a polite conversation in the firelight with the two
naked madmen, a kind of serious
conversation about world affairs. Finally Japhy also got naked and
wandered around with his jug. Every time one of his girls looked at him he gave a loud roar and leaped at them and they ran out of the house squealing. It was
insane. I wondered what would ever
happen if the cops in Corte Madera got wind of this and came roarin up
the hill in their squad cars. The bonfire was bright, anybody down the road
could see everything that was going on in
the yard. Nevertheless it was strangely not out of place to see the
bonfire, the food on the board, hear the
guitar players, see the dense trees swaying in the breeze and a few naked men
in the party.
I talked to Japhy's father and
said "What you think about Japhy bein
naked?"
"Oh I don't give a damn,
Japh can do anything he wants far as I'm
concerned. Say where's that big old tall gal we was
197
dancin with?" He was a pure
Dharma Bum father. He had had it rough too, in his early years in the Oregon woods, taking care of a whole family in a cabin he'd built
himself and all the horny-headed troubles of trying to raise crops in
merciless country, and the cold winters. Now he was a well-to-do painting
contractor and had built himself one of the finest houses in Mill Valley and took good care of his sister. Japhy's own
mother was alone living in a rooming house in the north. Japhy was going
to take care of her when he got back from Japan.
I had seen a lonely letter from her. Japhy said his parents had
separated with a great deal of finality but when he got back from the monastery
he would see what he could do to take care
of her. Japhy didn't like to talk about her, and his father of course never mentioned her at all. But
I liked Japhy's father, the way he danced sweating and mad, the way he didn't mind any of the eccentric sights he saw,
the way he let everybody do what they wanted anyway and went home around
midnight in a shower of thrown flowers dancing off down to his car parked in the road.
Al Lark was
another nice guy who was there, just kept sitting sprawled with his guitar
plucking out rumbling rambling blues chords or sometimes flamenco and
looking off into space, and when the party was over at three a.m. he and his wife went to
sleep in sleeping bags in the yard and I could hear them goofing in the grass. "Let's dance," she said. "Ah,
go to sleep!" he said.
Psyche and Japhy were sore at
each other that night and she didn't want to come up the hill and honor his new
white sheets and stomped off to leave. I watched Japhy going up the hill, weaving drunk, the party was over.
198
I went with Psyche to her car and
said "Come on, why do you make Japhy
unhappy on his farewell night?"
"Oh he was mean to me, the hell with him."
"Aw come on, nobody'll eat you up the hill."
"I
don't care, I'm driving back to the city."
"Well, that's not nice, and Japhy told me he loved
you."
"I don't believe it."
"That's the story of
life," I said walking away with a huge jug of wine hooked in my forefinger
and I started up the hill and heard Psyche
trying to back up her car and do a U-turn in the narrow road and the back end landed in the ditch and she couldn't get out and had to sleep on Christine's
floor anyway. Meanwhile Bud and
Coughlin and Alvah and George were all up
in the shack sprawled out in various blankets and sleeping bags on the floors. I put my bag down in the
sweet grass and felt I was the most fortunate person of the lot. So the
party was over and all the screaming was
done and what was accomplished? I
began to sing in the night, enjoying myself with the jug. The stars were blinding bright.
"A
mosquito as big as Mount Sumeru is much bigger than you
think!" yelled Coughlin from inside the shack, hearing me sing.
I yelled back, "A horse's hoof is more delicate
than it looks!"
Alvah came
running out in his long underwear and did a big dance and howled long poems in the
grass. Finally we had Bud up talking earnestly about his latest idea. We had a kind of a new
party up there. "Let's go down see how many gals are left!" I went
down the hill rolling half the way and tried to make Psyche come up again but she was out like a light on the floor.
The embers of the big bonfire were still red hot and plenty of heat was being
given off. Sean was snoring in his
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wife's bedroom. I took some bread from
the board and spread cottage cheese on it and ate, and drank wine. I was all
alone by the fire
and it was getting gray dawn in the east. "Boy, am I drunk!" I said.
"Wake up! wake up!" I yelled. "The goat of day is butting dawn! No ifs or buts! Bang! Come
on, you girls! gimps! punks!
thieves! pimps! hangmen! Run!" Then I suddenly had the most
tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human
beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little
petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon
forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the
sound of silence was everywhere and therefore
everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that
what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all? I staggered up
the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping
figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly
little adventure of earth with me? And who was I? Poor Japhy, at eight a.m. he got up and banged on his frying pan
and chanted the "Gocchami"
chant and called everybody to pancakes.
The party went on for days; the
morning of the third day people were still sprawled about the grounds when Japhy and I sneaked our rucksacks out, with a few
choice gro-
200
ceries, and started down the road in
the orange early-morning sun of California golden days. It was
going to be a great day, we were back in our element: trails.
Japhy was in
high spirits. "Goddammit it feels good to get away from
dissipation and go in the woods. When I get back from Japan, Ray, when the weather gets
really cold we'll put on our long underwear and hitchhike through the land.
Think if you can of
ocean to mountain Alaska to Klamath a solid forest
of fir to bhikku in, a lake of a million wild geese. Woo! You know what woo means in Chinese?" '
"What?"
"Fog.
These woods are great here in Marin, I'll show you Muir Woods today, but up north is
all that real old Pacific Coast mountain and ocean land, the future home of the
Dharma-body. Know what I'm gonna do? I'll do
a new long poem called 'Rivers and Mountains Without End' and just write it on and on on a scroll and unfold on and
on with new surprises and always
what went before forgotten, see, like a river, or like one of them real long Chinese silk paintings that show
two little men hiking in an endless landscape of gnarled old trees and
mountains so high they merge with the fog in the
upper silk void. I'll spend three thousand years writing it, it'll be
packed full of information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, astronomy, geology, Hsuan Tsung's travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation,
Oceanic ecology and food
chains."
"Go to
it, boy." As ever I strode on behind him and when we began to
climb, with our packs feeling good on our backs as though we were pack animals
and didn't feel right without a burden, it was that same old lonesome old
good old thwap thwap
up the trail, slowly, a mile an hour. We came to the
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end of the steep road where we had to go through a few houses built near steep bushy cliffs with
waterfalls trickling down, then up to
a high steep meadow, full of butterflies and hay and a little seven a.m. dew,
and down to a dirt road, then to the
end of the dirt road, which rose higher and higher till we could see vistas of Corte Madera and Mill
Valley far away and even the red top
of Golden Gate Bridge.
"Tomorrow
afternoon on our run to Stimson Beach," said Japhy,
"you'll see the whole white city of San Francisco miles away in the
blue bay. Ray, by God, later on in our future life we can have
a fine free-wheeling tribe in these California hills, get girls
and have dozens of radiant enlightened brats, live like Indians in
hogans and eat berries and buds."
"No beans?"
"We'll
write poems, we'll get a printing press and print our own poems,
the Dharma Press, we'll poetize the lot and make a fat book of icy bombs for the booby
public."
"Ah the public ain't so bad, they suffer too. You
always read about some tarpaper shack burning somewhere in the Middlewest with three little children perishing
and you see a picture of the parents crying. Even the kitty was burned. Japhy, do you think God made the world to amuse
himself because he was bored?
Because if so he would have to be mean."
"Ho, who would you mean by God?"
"Just Tathagata, if you will."
"Well it says in the sutra
that God, or Tathagata, doesn't himself
emanate a world from his womb but it just appears due to the ignorance of sentient beings."
"But
he emanated the sentient beings and their ignorance too. It's all too pitiful. I
ain't gonna rest till I find out why, Japhy,
why."
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"Ah don't trouble your mind
essence. Remember that in pure Tathagata mind essence there is no asking of the
question why and not even any significance
attached to it."
"Well, then nothing's really happening, then."
He threw a stick at me and hit me on the foot.
"Well, that didn't happen," I said.
"I really don't know, Ray,
but I appreciate your sadness about the world. 'Tis indeed. Look at that party
the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but
we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate. What do you think about death, Ray?"
"I
think death is our reward. When we die we go straight to nirvana
Heaven and that's that."
"But
supposing you're reborn in the lower hells and have hot redhot balls
of iron shoved down your throat by devils."
"Life's already shoved an
iron foot down my mouth. But I don't think that's anything but a dream
cooked up by some hysterical monks who
didn't understand Buddha's peace under the Bo Tree or for that matter
Christ's peace looking down on the heads of
his tormentors and forgiving them."
"You really like Christ, don't you?"
"Of
course I do. And after all, a lot of people say he is Maitreya, the
Buddha prophesied to appear after Sakyamuni, you know, Maitreya means 'Love' in
Sanskrit and that's all Christ talked about was love."
"Oh,
don't start preaching Christianity to me, I can just see you on your
deathbed kissing the cross like some old Karamazov or like our old friend Dwight
Goddard who spent his life as a Buddhist and suddenly returned to
Christianity in his last days. Ah that's not for me, I want to spend hours every day in a
lonely temple meditating in front of a sealed statue of
203
Kwannon which no one is ever allowed to see because it's
too powerful. Strike hard, old diamond!" "It'll
all come out in the wash."
"You remember Rol Sturlason my buddy who went to Japan
to study those rocks of Ryoanji. He went over on a freighter named Sea
Serpent so he painted a big mural of a sea
serpent and mermaids on a bulkhead in the messhall to the delight of the crew who dug him like crazy and
all wanted to become Dharma Bums
right there. Now he's climbing up holy Mount Hiei in Kyoto through a
foot of snow probably, straight up where there are no trails, steep steep,
through bamboo thickets and twisty pine
like in brush drawings. Feet wet and lunch forgot, that's the way to
climb." "What are you going to wear in the monastery, anyway?"
"Oh man, the works, old T'ang Dynasty style things long black floppy with huge droopy sleeves and funny
pleats, make you feel real
Oriental."
"Alvah
says that while guys like us are all excited about being real Orientals and wearing
robes, actual Orientals over there are
reading surrealism and Charles Darwin and mad about Western business suits."
"East'11
meet West anyway. Think what a great world revolution will take place when East
meets West finally, and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their
backs tramping around the back country and hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody."
"That's a lot like the early days of the Crusades,
Walter the Penniless
and Peter the Hermit leading ragged bands of believers to the Holy Land." "Yeah but that was all such
European gloom and crap, I
204
want my Dharma Bums to have springtime in their hearts when the blooms are girling and the birds are
dropping little fresh turds surprising cats who wanted to eat them a moment ago."
"What are you thinking about?"
"Just
makin up poems in my head as I climb toward Mount Tamalpais.
See up there ahead, as beautiful a mountain as you'll see anywhere in the world, a
beautiful shape to it, I really love
Tamalpais. We'll sleep tonight way around the back of it. Take us till
late afternoon to get there."
The Marin
country was much more rustic and kindly than the rough Sierra country we'd climbed last fall: it was all
flowers, flowers, trees, bushes, but also a
great deal of poison oak by the side of the trail. When we got to the
end of the high dirt road we suddenly
plunged into the dense redwood forest and went along following a
pipeline through glades that were so deep the fresh morning sun barely
penetrated and it was cold and damp. But
the odor was pure deep rich pine and
wet logs. Japhy was all talk this morning. He was like a little kid again
now that he was out on the trail. "The only thing wrong with that
monastery shot in Japan for me, is, though for all their intelligence and good
intentions, the Americans out there, they
have so little real sense of America and
who the people are who really dig Buddhism here, and they don't have any use for poetry."
"Who?"
"Well,
the people who are sending me out there and finance things. They
spend their good money fixing elegant scenes of gardens and books and Japanese
architecture and all that crap which nobody will like or be able to use anyway but rich American
divorcees on Japanese cruises and all they really
205
should do is just build or buy an old
Jap house and vegetable garden and have a place there for cats to hang out in and be
Buddhists, I mean have a real flower of something and not just the usual American middleclass fuggup with
appearances. Anyway I'm looking
forward to it, oh boy I can just see myself in the morning sitting on
the mats with a low table at my side,
typing on my portable, and my hibachi nearby with a pot of hot water on
it keeping hot and all my papers and maps
and pipe and flashlight neatly packed away and outside plum trees and
pines with snow on the boughs and up on Mount
Hieizan the snow getting deep and sugi and hinoki all around, them's
redwoods, boy, and cedars. Little tucked-away
temples down the rocky trails, cold mossy ancient places where frogs croak, and inside small statues and
hanging buttery lamps and gold lotuses and paintings and ancient incense-soaked smells and lacquer chests with
statues." His boat was leaving in two days. "But I'm sad too about
leaving California . . . s'why I wanted to take one last long look at
it today with ya, Ray."
We came up
out of the gladey redwood forest onto a road, where there was a mountain lodge,
then crossed the road and dipped down again through bushes to a trail that probably nobody even knew was there except a few hikers,
and we were in Muir Woods. It
extended, a vast valley, for miles before us. An old logger road led us
for two miles then Japhy got off and
scrambled up the slope and got onto another trail nobody dreamed was there. We hiked on this one, up and
down along a tumbling creek, with
fallen logs again where you crossed the creek, and sometimes bridges
that had been built Japhy said by the Boy Scouts, trees sawed in half the flat
surface for walking. Then we climbed up a steep pine slope and came
206
out to the highway and went up the
side of a hill of grass and came out in some outdoor theater, done up Greek style with stone
seats all around a bare stone arrangement for four-dimensional presentations of Aeschylus and Sophocles. We drank water
and sat down and took our shoes off and watched the silent play from the upper stone seats. Far away you could see the
Golden Gate Bridge and the whiteness of San Francisco.
Japhy began
to shriek and hoot and whistle and sing, full of pure gladness. Nobody around to hear him. "This is the
way you'll be on top of Mount Desolation,
this summer, Ray."
"I'll sing at the top of my
voice for the first time in my life."
"If anybody hears ya it'll
just be the conies, or maybe a critic bear. Ray that Skagit country where
you're going is the greatest place in America, that snaky river running back
through gorges and into its own unpeopled watershed, wet snowy mountains fading
into dry pine mountains and deep valleys like Big Beaver and Little Beaver with
some of the best virgin stands of red cedar
left in the world. I keep thinking
of my abandoned Crater Mountain Lookout house sitting up there with
nobody but the conies in the howling winds, getting old, the conies down in
their furry nests deep under boulders, and warm, eating seeds or whatever they
eat. The closer you get to real matter,
rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is. All these
people thinking they're hardheaded materialistic practical types, they don't
know shit about matter, their heads are
full of dreamy ideas and notions."
He raised his hand. "Listen to that quail calling."
"I wonder what everybody's doing back at
Sean's."
"Well they're all up now and
starting on that sour old red wine again and sitting around talking nothing.
They should
207
have all come with us and learnt something." He picked
up his pack and started off. In a half-hour
we were in a beautiful meadow following a dusty little trail over shallow
creeks and finally we were at
Potrero Meadows camp. It was a National Forest camp with a stone fireplace and picnic tables and everything
but no one would be there till the weekend. A few miles away, the lookout shack
on top of Tamalpais looked right down on us. We undid our packs and spent a
quiet late afternoon dozing in the sun or Japhy ran around looking at
butterflies and birds and making notes in his notebook and I hiked alone down
the other side, north, where a desolate rocky country much like the Sierras
stretched out toward the sea.
At dusk Japhy lit a good big fire and started supper. We
were very tired and happy. He made a soup that night that I shall never forget and was really the best soup
I'd eaten since I was a lionized
young author in New York eating lunch at the Chambord or in Henri Cru's
kitchen. This was nothing but a couple of envelopes of dried pea soup thrown
into a pot of water with fried bacon, fat and all, and stirred till boiling. It
was rich, real pea taste, with that smoky
bacon and bacon fat, just the thing to drink in the cold gathering
darkness by a sparkling fire. Also while
pooking about he'd found puffballs, natural
mushrooms, not the umbrella type, just round grapefruit-size puffs of
white firm meat, and these he sliced and fried in bacon fat and we had them on
the side with fried rice. It was a great
supper. We washed the dishes in the gurgling creek. The roaring bonfire kept the mosquitoes away. A new
moon peeked down through the pine boughs. We rolled out our sleeping bags in
the meadow grass and went to bed early, bone
weary.
208
"Well Ray," said Japhy,
"pretty soon I'll be far out to sea and you'll be hitchhiking up the coast
to Seattle and on through the Skagit
country. I wonder what'll happen to all of us."
We went to
sleep on this dreamy theme. During the night I had a vivid dream, one of the most
distinct dreams I ever had, I clearly saw a crowded dirty smoky Chinese
market with beggars and vendors and pack horses and mud and smokepots
and piles of rubbish
and vegetables for sale in dirty clay pans on the ground and suddenly from the
mountains a ragged hobo, a little seamed
brown unimaginable Chinese hobo, had come down and was just standing at the end of the market, surveying
it with an expressionless humor. He was short, wiry, his face leathered hard
and dark red by the sun of the desert and the
mountains; his clothes were nothing but gathered rags; he had a pack of leather on his back; he was
barefooted. I had seen guys like that only seldom, and only in Mexico, maybe
coming into Monterrey out of those stark rock mountains, beggars who probably live in caves. But this one was a
Chinese twice-as-poor, twice-as-tough and infinitely mysterious tramp
and it was Japhy for sure. It was the same broad mouth, merry twinkling eyes,
bony face (a face like Dostoevsky's death mask, with prominent eyebrow bones
and square head); and he was short and compact like Japhy. I woke up at dawn, thinking "Wow, is that what'll happen
to Japhy? Maybe he'll leave that monastery and just disappear and we'll
never see him again, and he'll be the Han Shan ghost of the Orient mountains and even the Chinese'11 be afraid of him
he'll be so raggedy and beat."
I told Japhy about it. He was
already up stoking the fire and whistling.
"Well don't just lay there in your sleeping bag
209
pullin your puddin, get up and fetch
some water. Yodelayhee hoo! Ray, I will bring you incense sticks
from the cold water temple of Kiyomizu and set them one by one in a big brass
incense bowl and do
the proper bows, how's about that. That was
some dream you had. If that's me, then it's me. Ever weeping, ever
youthful, hoo!" He got out the hand-ax from the rucksack and hammered at boughs and got a crackling fire going.
There was still mist in the trees and fog on the ground. "Let's pack up
and take off and dig Laurel Dell camp. Then we'll
hike over the trails down to the sea and swim."
"Great." On this trip
Japhy had brought along a delicious combination
for hiking energy: Ry-Krisp crackers, good sharp Cheddar cheese a wedge of that, and a roll of salami. We had this
for breakfast with hot fresh tea and felt great. Two grown men could live two
days on that concentrated bread and that
salami (concentrated meat) and cheese and the whole thing only weighed about a pound and a half. Japhy was full
of great ideas like that. What hope, what human energy, what truly American
optimism was packed in that neat little frame
of his! There he was clomping along in front of me on the trail and
shouting back "Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at
the trail at your feet and don't look about and just fall into a trance as the
ground zips by."
We arrived at Laurel Dell camp at
about ten, it was also supplied with stone fireplaces with grates, and picnic
tables, but the surroundings were infinitely more beautiful than Potrero Meadows. Here were the real meadows:
dreamy beauties with soft grass
sloping all around, fringed by heavy deep green timber, the whole scene of waving grass and brooks and nothing in sight.
"By God, I'm gonna come back here and bring nothing
but
210
food and gasoline and a primus and
cook my suppers smokeless and the Forest Service won't even know the
difference."
"Yeah,
but if they ever catch you cooking away from these stone places they put you
out, Smith."
"But
what would I do on weekends, join the merry picnickers? I'd just hide up there
beyond that beautiful meadow. I'd stay
there forever."
"And you'd only have two miles of trail down to
Stimson Beach and your grocery store down there." At noon we started for the beach. It was a tremendously
grinding trip. We climbed way up high on meadows, where again we could see San
Francisco far away, then dipped down into a steep trail that seemed to fall directly down to sea level; you had sometimes to run down the trail or slide on your
back, one. A torrent of water fell
down at the side of the trail. I went ahead of Japhy and began swinging down the trail so fast, singing happily, I left him behind about a mile and had to
wait for him at the bottom. He was taking his time enjoying the ferns
and flowers. We stashed our rucksacks in
the fallen leaves under bushes and
hiked freely down the sea meadows and past seaside farmhouses with cows
browsing, to the beach community, where we
bought wine in a grocery store and stomped on out into the sand and the waves. It was a chill day
with only occasional flashes of sun.
But we were making it. We jumped into the ocean in our shorts and swam
swiftly around then came out and spread out
some of our salami and Ry-Krisp and cheese on a piece of paper in the sand and drank wine and talked. At one
point I even took a nap. Japhy was feeling very good. "Goddammit, Ray, you'll never know how happy I am we decided
to have these last two days hiking. I feel good all over again. I know somethin good's gonna come
out of all this!"
211
"All what?"
"I
dunno—out of the way we feel about life. You and I ain't out to bust anybody's skull, or
cut someone's throat in an economic way,
we've dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we're strong enough we'll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints. Who knows,
the world might wake up and burst out into a beautiful flower of Dharma everywhere."
After
dozing awhile he woke up and looked and said, "Look at all that water out there
stretching all the way to Japan." He
was getting sadder and sadder about leaving.
We started back and found our
packs and went back up that trail that had
dropped straight down to sea level, a sheer crawling handgrasping climb
among rocks and little trees that exhausted us, but finally we came out on a
beautiful meadow and climbed it and again
saw all San Francisco in the distance. "Jack London used to walk
this trail," said Japhy. We proceeded along the south slope of a beautiful
mountain that afforded us a view of the Golden Gate and even of Oakland miles away for hours on end as we trudged. There
were beautiful natural parks of serene oaks, all golden and green in the late afternoon, and many wild flowers. Once
212
we saw a fawn standing at a nub of
grass, staring at us with wonder. We came down off this meadow down
deep into a redwood forest then up again, again so steeply that we
were cursing and sweating in the dust. Trails are like that: you're floating
along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs
and fluteboys, then suddenly you're struggling in a hot
broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak . . . just like
life. "Bad karma automatically produces good karma," said Japhy,
"don't cuss so much and come on, we'll soon be sitting
pretty on a flat hill."
The last two miles of the hill were terrible and I said
"Japhy there's one thing I would like right now more than anything in the world—more than anything I've
ever wanted all my life." Cold dusk winds were blowing, we hurried bent with our packs on the endless trail. "What?"
"A
nice big Hershey bar or even a little one. For some reason or other, a Hershey
bar would save my soul right now."
"There's
your Buddhism, a Hershey bar. How about moonlight in an orange grove and a
vanilla ice-cream cone?"
"Too
cold. What I need, want, pray for, yearn for, dying for, right now, is a Hershey bar ... with nuts." We were very tired and
trudging along home talking like two children. I kept repeating and repeating about my good old Hershey bar. I really meant it. I needed the energy anyway, I
was a little woozy and needed sugar,
but to think of chocolate and peanuts all melting in my mouth in that
cold wind, it was too much.
Soon we
were climbing over the corral fence that led to the horse meadow over our shack and
then climbing over the barbed-wire fence right in our yard and trudging down
213
the final twenty feet of high grass
past my rosebush bed to the door of the good old little shack. It was our last night home
together. We sat sadly in the dark shack taking off our boots and sighing. I couldn't do anything but sit on my
feet, sitting on my feet took the pain out of them. "No more hikes for me forever," I said.
Japhy said "Well we still
have to get supper and I see where we used up everything this weekend. I'll
have to go down the road to the supermarket
and get some food."
"Oh, man, aren't you tired?
Just go to bed, we'll eat tomorrow." But he sadly put on his boots again
and went out. Everybody was gone, the party
had ended when it was found that Japhy and I had disappeared. I lit the
fire and lay down and even slept awhile and
suddenly it was dark and Japhy came in
and lit the kerosene lamp and dumped the groceries on the table, and among them
were three bars of Hershey chocolate just for me. It was the greatest
Hershey bar I ever ate. He'd also brought
my favorite wine, red port, just for me.
"I'm
leaving, Ray, and I figured you and me might celebrate a little. . . ." His voice
trailed off sadly and tiredly. When Japhy was tired, and he often wore himself
out completely hiking or working, his voice sounded far-off and small. But pretty soon he roused his resources together and began
cooking a supper and singing at the
stove like a millionaire, stomping
around in his boots on the resounding wood floor, arranging bouquets of
flowers in the clay pots, boiling water for tea, plucking on his guitar, trying
to cheer me up as I lay there staring sadly at the burlap ceiling. It was our
last night, we both felt it.
"I wonder which one of us'll
die first," I mused out loud. "Whoever
it is, come on back, ghost, and give 'em the key."
214
"Ha!" He brought me my
supper and we sat crosslegged and chomped
away as on so many nights before: just the wind furying in the ocean of
trees and our teeth going chomp chomp over good simple mournful bhikku food.
"Just think, Ray, what it was like right here on this hill where our shack
stands thirty thousand years ago in the time of the Neanderthal man. And do you realize that they say in the
sutras there was a Buddha of that
time, Dipankara?"
"The one who never said anything!"
"Can't you just see all
those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their
Buddha saying nothing and knowing
everything?"
"The
stars were the same then as they are tonight."
Later that night Sean came up and
sat crosslegged and talked briefly and sadly with Japhy. It was all over. Then
Christine came up with both children in her arms, she was a good strong girl
and could climb hills with great burdens. That night I went to sleep in my bag
by the rosebush and rued the sudden cold
darkness that had fallen over the shack. It reminded me of the early
chapters in the life of Buddha, when he
decides to leave the Palace, leaving his mourning wife and child and his poor father and riding away on a
white horse to go cut off his golden hair in the woods and send the horse back with the weeping servant, and embarks on
a mournful journey through the forest to find the truth forever.
"Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon," wrote
Ashvhaghosha almost two thousand years ago, "then at nightfall vanish all
away, so are the separations of the world."
The next day I figured to give
Japhy some kind of strange little going-away gift and didn't have much money or
any
215
ideas particularly so I took a little
piece of paper about as big as a thumbnail and carefully printed on it: may you use the diamondcutter of mercy and when I said goodbye to him at the pier I handed it to him, and
he read it, put it right in his pocket, and
said nothing.
The last
thing he was seen doing in San Francisco: Psyche had finally melted and written him a note saying "Meet
me on your ship in your cabin and I'll give
you what you want," or words to that effect, so that was why none
of us went on board to see him off in his
cabin, Psyche was waiting there for a final passionate love scene. Only
Sean was allowed to go aboard and hover around for whatever was going to
happen. So after we all waved goodbye and went away, Japhy and Psyche presumably made love in the cabin and then
she began to cry and insist she
wanted to go to Japan too and the captain ordered everybody off but she
wouldn't get off and the last thing was: the
boat was pulling away from the pier and Japhy came out on deck with Psyche in his arms and threw her clean off
the boat, he was strong enough to throw a girl ten feet, right on the pier,
where Sean helped catch her. And though it wasn't exactly in keeping with the
diamondcutter of mercy it was good enough, he wanted to get to that other shore
and get on to his business. His business was with the Dharma. And the freighter
sailed away out the Golden Gate and out to the deep swells of the gray Pacific,
westward across. Psyche cried, Sean cried,
everybody felt sad.
Warren Coughlin said "Too
bad, he'll probably disappear into Central
Asia marching about on a quiet but steady round from Kashgar to Lanchow
via Lhasa with a string of yaks selling popcorn, safety-pins, and assorted
colors of sewing-thread and occasionally climb a Himalaya and end up en-
2l6
lightening
the Dalai Lama and all the gang for miles around and never be heard of again."
"No
he won't," I said, "he loves us too much."
Alvah said, "It all ends in tears anyway."
Now, as though Japhy's finger
were pointing me the way, I started north to my mountain.
It was the
morning of June 18, 1956. I came down and said goodbye to Christine and thanked her for everything and walked down the road. She waved from the grassy
yard. "It's going to be lonely around here with everybody gone and
no big huge parties on weekends." She
really enjoyed everything that had gone on. There she was standing in
the yard barefooted, with little barefooted Prajna, as I walked off along the horse meadow.
I had an easy trip north, as
though Japhy's best wishes for me to get to my mountain that could be kept
forever, were with me. On 101 I immediately got a ride from a teacher of social
studies, from Boston originally, who used to sing on Cape Cod and had fainted
just yesterday at his buddy's wedding because he'd been fasting. When he left
me off at Cloverdale I bought my supplies
for the road: a salami, Cheddar cheese wedge, Ry-Krisp and also some
dates for dessert, all
217
put away neatly in my foodwrappers. I still had peanuts and
raisins left over from our last hike together. Japhy had said, "I won't be needing those peanuts and
raisins on that freighter." I
recalled with a twinge of sadness how Japhy was always so dead serious
about food, and I wished the whole world was dead
serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives
using everybody's food money to blow their heads
off anyway.
I hiked about a mile after eating
my lunch in back of a garage, up to a bridge on the Russian River, where, in
gray gloom, I was stuck for as much as
three hours. But suddenly I got an unexpected short ride from a farmer
with a tic that made his face twitch, with
his wife and boy, to a small town, Preston, where a truckdriver offered
me a ride all the way to Eureka ("Eureka!" I yelled) and then he got
talking to me and said "Goldang it I get lonesome driving this rig, I want
someone to talk to all night, I'll take you
all the way to Crescent City if you want." This was a little off
my route but farther north than Eureka so I said okay. The guy's name was Ray
Breton, he drove me two hundred and eighty miles all night in the rain, talking
ceaselessly about his whole life, his brothers, his wives, sons, his father and
at Humboldt Redwood Forest in a restaurant called Forest of Arden I had a fabulous dinner of fried shrimp with huge
strawberry pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert and a whole pot of coffee and he
paid for the whole works. I got him off talking about his troubles to talk
about the Last Things and he said, "Yeah, those who're good stay in
Heaven, they've been in Heaven from the
beginning," which was very wise.
We drove through the rainy night
and arrived at Crescent City at dawn in a gray fog, a small town by the sea,
and
2l8
parked the truck in the sand by the beach and slept an
hour. Then he left me after buying me a
breakfast of pancakes and eggs,
probably sick and tired of paying for all my meals, and I started
walking out of Crescent City and over on an eastward road, Highway 199, to get
back to big-shot 99 that would shoot me to Portland and Seattle faster than the
more picturesque but slower coast road.
Suddenly I felt so free I began
to walk on the wrong side of the road and
sticking out my thumb from that side, hiking like a Chinese Saint to
Nowhere for no reason, going to my mountain to rejoice. Poor little angel
world! I suddenly didn't care any more, I'd walk all the way. But just because I was dancing along on the wrong side of the road
and didn't care, anybody began to
pick me up immediately, a goldminer with
a small caterpillar up front being hauled by his son, and we had a long talk
about the woods, the Siskiyou Mountains (through which we were driving,
toward Grants Pass Oregon), and how to make good baked fish, he said, just by
lighting a fire in the clean yellow sand by a creek and then burying the fish
in the hot sand after you've scraped away the
fire and just leaving it there a few hours then taking it out and cleaning
it of sand. He was very interested in my rucksack
and my plans.
He left me
off at a mountain village very similar to Bridgeport California where Japhy and I had
sat in the sun. I walked out a mile and took a nap in the woods, right in the heart of the
Siskiyou Range. I woke up from my nap feeling very strange in the Chinese
unknown fog. I walked on the same way, wrong side, got a ride at Kerby from a
blond used-car dealer to Grants Pass, and
there, after a fat cowboy in a gravel truck
with a malicious grin on his face deliberately tried to run
219
over my rucksack in the road, I got a ride from a sad
logger boy in a tin hat going very fast across a great swooping up and down dream valley thruway to Canyonville,
where, as in a dream, a crazy store-truck
full of gloves for sale stopped and the driver, Ernest Petersen,
chatting amiably all the way and insisting that I sit on the seat that faced
him (so that I was being zoomed down the
road backward) took me to Eugene Oregon. He talked about everything under the sun,
bought me two beers, and even stopped at several gas stations and hung out displays of gloves. He said, "My father was a great man, his saying was 'There are more
horses'- asses than horses in this
world.' " He was a mad sports fan and timed outdoor track meets
with a stopwatch and rushed around fearlessly and independently in his own
truck defying local attempts to get him in
the unions.
At red
nightfall he bade me farewell near a sweet pond outside Eugene. There I intended to
spend the night. I spread my bag out under a pine in a dense thicket across the
road from cute suburban cottages that
couldn't see me and wouldn't see me because they were all looking at
television anyway, and ate my supper and
slept twelve hours in the bag, waking up only once in the middle of the
night to put on mosquito repellent.
At morning
I could see the mighty beginnings of the Cascade Range, the northernmost end of which would be my
mountain on the skirt of Canada, four hundred more miles north. The morning brook was smoky because of the
lumber mill across the highway. I
washed up in the brook and took off after one short prayer over the
beads Japhy had given me in Matterhorn camp: "Adoration to emptiness of
the divine Buddha bead."
220
I immediately got a ride on the
open highway from two tough young hombres to outside Junction City where I had coffee and walked two miles to a roadside
restaurant that looked better and had pancakes and then walking along
the highway rocks, cars zipping by, wondering how I'd ever get to Portland let
alone Seattle, I got a ride from a little funny lighthaired housepainter with
spattered shoes and four pint cans of cold beer who also stopped at a roadside
tavern for more beer and finally we were in
Portland crossing vast eternity bridges as draws went up behind us to
allow crane barges through in the big smoky
river city scene surrounded by pine ridges. In downtown Portland I took
the twenty-five-cent bus to Vancouver
Washington, ate a Coney Island hamburger there, then out on the road,
99, where a sweet young mustached one-kidney Bodhisattva Okie picked me up and
said "I'm s'proud I picked you up, someone to talk to," and everywhere we stopped for coffee he played the
pinball machines with dead
seriousness and also he picked up all hitchhikers on the road, first a
big drawling Okie from Alabama then a crazy
sailor from Montana who was full of crazed intelligent talk and we
balled right up to Olympia Washington at eighty m.p.h. then up Olympic
Peninsula on curvy woodsroads to the Naval Base at Bremerton Washington where a
fifty-cent ferry ride was all that separated me from Seattle!
We said
goodbye and the Okie bum and I went on the ferry, I paid his fare in gratitude for
my terrific good luck on the road, and even
gave him handfuls of peanuts and raisins which he devoured hungrily so I
also gave him salami and cheese.
Then, while he sat in the main
room, I went topdeck as the ferry pulled out in a cold drizzle to dig and enjoy
Puget
221
Sound. It was one hour sailing to the Port of Seattle and I
found a half-pint of vodka stuck in the deck rail concealed under a Time magazine and just casually
drank it and opened my rucksack and took out my warm sweater to go under
my rain jacket and paced up and down all
alone on the cold fog-swept deck feeling wild and lyrical. And suddenly I saw
that the Northwest was a great deal more than the little vision I had of
it of Japhy in my mind. It was miles and miles of unbelievable mountains grooking on all horizons in the wild broken
clouds, Mount Olympus and Mount Baker, a giant orange sash in the gloom over the Pacific-ward skies that led I
knew toward the Hokkaido Siberian desolations of the world. I huddled against
the bridgehouse hearing the Mark Twain talk of the skipper and the wheelman inside.
In the deepened dusk fog ahead the big red
neons saying: port of seattle. And
suddenly everything Japhy had ever told me about Seattle began to seep into me like cold rain, I could feel it
and see it now, and not just think it. It was exactly like he'd said: wet, immense, timbered, mountainous,
cold, exhilarating, challenging. The ferry nosed in at the pier on
Alaskan Way and immediately I saw the totem poles in old stores and the ancient
1880-style switch goat with sleepy firemen
chug chugging up and down the waterfront spur like a scene from my own dreams, the old Casey Jones
locomotive of America, the only one I ever saw that old outside of Western movies, but actually working and hauling
boxcars in the smoky gloom of the magic city.
I immediately went to a good
clean skid row hotel, the Hotel Stevens, got a room for the night for a dollar
seventy-five and had a hot tub bath and a good long sleep and in the morning I
shaved and walked out First Avenue and acciden-
222
tally found all kinds of Goodwill stores with wonderful sweaters and red underwear for sale and I had a
big breakfast with five-cent coffee in the crowded market morning with
blue sky and clouds scudding overhead and waters of Puget Sound sparkling and dancing under old piers. It
was real true Northwest. At noon I checked out of the hotel, with my new wool socks and bandanas and things all packed
in gladly, and walked out to 99 a few miles out of town and got many short rides.
Now I was beginning to see the Cascades on the northeast horizon, unbelievable jags and twisted rock and
snow-covered immensities, enough to make you gulp. The road ran right through the dreamy fertile valleys of the
Stilaquamish and the. Skagit, rich butterfat valleys with farms and cows
browsing under that tremendous background of snow-pure heaps. The further north
I hitched the bigger the mountains got till I finally began to feel afraid. I
got a ride from a fellow who looked like a
bespectacled careful lawyer in a conservative car, but turned out he was
the famous Bat Lindstrom the hardtop racing champion and his conservative
automobile had in it a souped-up motor that could make it go a hundred and seventy miles an hour. But he just demonstrated
it by gunning it at a red light to let me hear the deep hum of power.
Then I got a ride from a lumberman who said he knew the forest rangers where I
was going and said "The Skagit Valley is second
only to the Nile for fertility." He left me off at Highway i-G,
which was the little highway to I7-A that wound into the heart of the mountains
and in fact would come to a dead-end as a
dirt road at Diablo Dam. Now I was really in the mountain country. The fellows who picked me up were loggers,
uranium prospectors, farmers, they drove me through
223
the final big town of Skagit Valley,
Sedro Woolley, a farming market town, and then out as the road got
narrower and more curved among cliffs and the Skagit River, which we'd
crossed on 99 as a dreaming belly river with meadows on both sides, was now a pure torrent of melted snow pouring narrow and fast between
muddy snag shores. Cliffs began to appear on both
sides. The snow-covered mountains themselves had disappeared, receded
from my view, I couldn't see them any more but
now I was beginning to feel them more.
In an old tavern I saw an old
decrepit man who could hardly move around to get me a beer behind the bar, I
thought "I'd rather die in a glacial cave than in an eternity afternoon
room of dust like this." A Min V Bill couple left me off at a grocery store in Sauk and there I got my final ride from a
mad drunk fastswerving dark lorig-sideburned guitar-playing Skagit
Valley wrangler who came to a dusty flying stop at the Marblemount Ranger
Station and had me home.
The
assistant ranger was standing there watching. "Are you Smith?"
"Yeah."
"That a friend of yours?"
"No,
just a ride he gave me."
224
"Who does he think he is speeding on government property."
I gulped, I wasn't a free bhikku
any more. Not until I'd get to my hideaway
mountain that next week. I had to spend a whole week at Fire School with
whole bunches of young kids, all of us in
tin hats which we wore either straight on our heads or as I did at a rakish tilt, and we dug fire lines in the wet woods or felled trees or put out experimental
small fires and I met the oldtimer ranger and onetime logger Burnie Byers, the "lumberjack" that Japhy was
always imitating with his big deep
funny voice.
Burnie and I sat in his truck in the woods and discussed Japhy. "It's a damn shame Japhy ain't come
back this year. He was the best
lookout we ever had and by God he was the best trailworker I ever seen. Just eager and anxious to go climbin around
and so durn cheerful, I ain't never seen a better kid. And he wasn't afraid of nobody, he'd just come right out with it. That's
what I like, cause when the time comes when a man can't say whatever he pleases I guess that'll be
when I'm gonna go up in the
backcountry and finish my life out in a lean-to. One thing about Japhy, though, wherever he'll be all the resta his life,
I don't care how old he gets, he'll always have a good time." Burnie was about sixty-five and
really spoke very paternally about
Japhy. Some of the other kids also remembered Japhy and wondered why he wasn't back. That night, because it was Burnie's fortieth anniversary in the
Forest Service, the other rangers voted him a gift, which was a brand
new big leather belt. Old Burnie was always
having trouble with belts and was
wearing a kind of cord at the time. So he put on his new belt and said something funny about how he'd
better not eat too much and
everybody applauded and cheered. I figured
225
Burnie
and Japhy were probably the two best men that had ever worked in this country.
After Fire School I spent some time hiking up the mountains in back of the Ranger Station or just
sitting by the rushing Skagit with
my pipe in my mouth and a bottle of wine between my crossed legs,
afternoons and also moonlit nights, while
the other kids went beering at local carnivals. The Skagit River at
Marblemount was a rushing clear snowmelt of pure green; above, Pacific Northwest pines were shrouded in clouds; and
further beyond were peak tops with clouds going right through them and then fitfully the sun would shine through. It was
the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet. The sun
shined on the roils, fighting snags held on. Birds scouted over the water
looking for secret smiling fish that only occasionally suddenly leaped flying
out of the water and arched their backs and fell in again into water that rushed on and obliterated their loophole, and
everything was swept along. Logs and snags came floating down at twenty-five miles an hour. I figured if I should try to
swim across the narrow river I'd be a half-mile downstream before I
kicked to the other shore. It was a river wonderland, the emptiness of the
golden eternity, odors of moss and bark and twigs and mud, all ululating mysterious visionstuff before my eyes, tranquil
and everlasting nevertheless, the hillhairing trees, the dancing sunlight. As I
looked up the clouds assumed, as I assumed, faces of hermits. The pine
boughs looked satisfied washing in the waters. The top trees shrouded in gray
fog looked content. The jiggling sunshine leaves of Northwest breeze seemed bred to rejoice. The upper snows on
the horizon, the trackless, seemed
cradled and warm. Everything was everlastingly
loose and responsive, it was all everywhere be-
226
yond the truth, beyond emptyspace
blue. "The mountains are mighty patient, Buddha-man," I said out
loud and took a drink. It was coldish, but when the sun peeped out the tree stump I was
sitting on turned into a red oven. When I went back in the moonlight to my same
old tree stump the world was like a dream,
like a phantom, like a bubble, like a shadow, like a vanishing dew, like a lightning's flash.
Time came finally for me to be packed up into my mountain.
I bought forty-five dollars' worth of groceries on credit in the little
Marblemount grocery store and we packed that in the truck, Happy the
muleskinner and I, and drove on up the
river to Diablo Dam. As we proceeded the Skagit got narrower and more
like a torrent, finally it was crashing over rocks
and being fed by side-falls of water from heavy timbered shores, it was
getting wilder and craggier all the time. The Skagit River was dammed back at
Newhalem, then again at Diablo Dam, where a giant Pittsburgh-type lift took you
up on a platform to the level of Diablo
Lake. There'd been a gold rush in the 1890S in this country, the
prospectors had built a trail through the
solid rock cliffs of the gorge between Newhalem and what was now Ross Lake, the final dam, and dotted the
drainages of Ruby Creek, Granite Creek, and Canyon Creek with claims that never paid off. Now most of this trail was under water anyway. In 1919 a fire had raged
in the Upper Skagit and all the
country around Desolation, my mountain, had burned and burned for two
months and filled the skies of northern Washington and British Columbia with
smoke that blotted out the sun. The government had tried to fight it, sent a
thousand men in with pack string supply lines that
then took three weeks from Marblemount fire camp, but only the fall
rains had stopped that blaze and the charred
227
snags, I was told, were still
standing on Desolation Peak and in some valleys. That was the reason for the name: Desolation.
"Boy," said funny old
Happy the muleskinner, who still wore his old floppy cowboy hat from Wyoming
days and rolled his own butts and kept making jokes, "don't be like the
kid we had a few years ago up on Desolation, we took him up there and he was the greenest kid I ever saw, I packed him
into his lookout and he tried to fry an egg for supper and broke it and missed the friggin fryingpan and missed the stove
and it landed on his boot, he didn't know whether to run shit or go blind and
when I left I told him not to flog his damn dummy too much and the sucker says
to me 'Yes sir, yes sir.'"
"Well I don't care, all I
want is to be alone up there this summer."
"You're sayin that now but
you'll change your tune soon enough. They all talk brave. But then you get to
talkin to yourself. That ain't so bad but don't start anywerin yourself,
son." Old Happy drove the pack mules on the gorge trail while I rode the
boat from Diablo Dam, to the foot of Ross Dam where you could see immense
dazzling openings of vistas that showed the Mount Baker National Forest mountains in wide panorama around Ross Lake that
extended shiningly all the way back to Canada. At Ross Dam the Forest Service floats were lashed a little way off from
the steep timbered shore. It was hard sleeping on those bunks at night, they swayed
with the float and the log and the wave combined to make a booming slapping noise that kept you awake.
The moon was full the night I
slept there, it was dancing on the waters. One of the lookouts said "The
moon is right
on the mountain, when I see that I always imagine I see a coyote silhouettin."
Finally came the gray rainy day
of my departure to Desolation Peak. The
assistant ranger was with us, the three of us were going up and it
wasn't going to be a pleasant day's horseback
riding in all that downpour. "Boy, you shoulda put a couple quarts
of brandy in your grocery list, you're gonna need it up there in the
cold," said Happy looking at me with his
big red nose. We were standing by the corral, Happy was giving the animals bags of feed and tying it
around their necks and they were chomping away unmindful of the rain. We
came plowing to the log gate and bumped through and went around under the immense
shrouds of Sourdough and Ruby mountains. The waves were crashing up and
spraying back at us. We went inside to the pilot's cabin and he had a pot of coffee ready. Firs on steep banks you
could barely see on the lake shore were like ranged ghosts in the mist.
It was the real Northwest grim and bitter
misery.
"Where's Desolation?" I asked.
"You ain't about to see it
today till you're practically on top of it," said Happy, "and then
you won't like it much. It's snowin and
hailin up there right now. Boy, ain't you sure you didn't sneak a little
bottle of brandy in your pack somewheres?" We'd already downed a quart of
blackberry wine he'd bought in Marblemount.
"Happy
when I get down from this mountain in September I'll buy you a whole quart of scotch." I was going to
be paid good money for finding the mountain I wanted.
"That's a promise and don't
you forget it." Japhy had told me a lot about Happy the Packer, he was
called. Happy was a good man; he and old
Burnie Byers were the best old-
229
timers on the scene. They knew the
mountains and they knew pack animals and they weren't ambitious to become forestry supervisors either.
Happy
remembered Japhy too, wistfully. "That boy used to know an awful lot of funny songs
and stuff. He shore loved to go out loggin
out trails. He had himself a Chinee girlfriend one rime down in Seattle,
I seen her in his hotel room, that Japhy I'm tellin you he shore was a
grunge-jumper with the women." I could hear Japhy's voice singing gay
songs with his guitar as the wind howled around our barge and the gray waves plashed up against the windows of the pilot
house.
"And
this is Japhy's lake, and these are Japhy's mountains," I thought,
and wished Japhy were there to see me doing everything he
wanted me to do.
In two hours we eased over to the
steep timbered shore eight miles uplake and
jumped off and lashed the float to old stumps
and Happy whacked the first mule, and she scampered off the wood with
her doublesided load and charged up the slippery bank, legs thrashing and
almost falling back in the lake with all my
groceries, but made it and went off clomping in the mist to wait on the
trail for her master. Then the other mules
with batteries and various equipment, then finally Happy leading the way
on his horse and then myself on the mare Mabel
and then Wally the assistant ranger.
We waved goodbye to the tugboat
man and started up a sad and dripping party
in a hard Arctic climb in heavy foggy rain
up narrow rocky trails with trees and underbrush wetting us clean to the
skin when we brushed by. I had my nylon poncho tied around the pommel of the
saddle and soon took it out and put it over me, a shroudy monk on a horse.
Happy and Wally didn't put on anything and
just rode wet with heads
230
bowed. The horse slipped occasionally in the rocks of the trail. We went on and on, up and up, and finally
we came to a snag that had fallen across the trail and Happy dismounted
and took out his doublebitted ax and went to work cursing and sweating and
hacking out a new shortcut trail around it with
Wally while I was delegated to watch the animals, which I did in a
rather comfortable way sitting under a bush and rolling a cigarette. The mules were afraid of the steepness and
roughness of the shortcut trail and Happy cursed at me "Goddammit
it grab 'im by the hair and drag 'im up here." Then the mare was afraid.
"Bring up that mare! You expect me to do everything around here by
myself?"
We finally got out of there and
climbed on up, soon leaving the shrubbery and entering a new alpine height of rocky meadow
with blue lupine and red poppy feathering the gray mist with lovely vaguenesses
of color and the wind blowing hard now and with sleet. "Five thousand feet
now!" yelled Happy from up front, turning in the saddle with his old hat furling in the wind, rolling himself a cigarette,
sitting easy in his saddle from a
whole lifetime on horses. The heather wild-flower drizzly meadows wound up and up, on switchback trails, the wind getting harder all the time, finally
Happy yelled: "See that big rock face up thar?" I looked up
and saw a goopy shroud of gray rock in the fog, just above. "That's
another thousand feet though you might think you can reach up and touch it. When we get there we're almost in. Only another half hour after
that."
"You sure you didn't bring
just a little extry bottle of brandy boy?" he yelled back a minute
later. He was wet and miserable but he didn't care and I could hear him singing
in the wind. By and by we were up above
timberline practically,
231
the meadow gave way to grim rocks and suddenly there was
snow on the ground to the right and to the left, the horses were slowshing in a sleety foot of it, you could
see the water holes their hoofs left, we were really way up there now.
Yet on all sides I could see nothing but fog and white snow and blowing mists.
On a clear day I would have been able to see the sheer drops from the side of
the trail and would have been scared for my horse's slips of hoof; but now all
I saw were vague intimations of treetops
way below that looked like little clumps
of grasses. "O Japhy," I thought, "and there you are
sailing across the ocean safe on a ship, warm in a cabin, writing letters to
Psyche and Sean and Christine."
The snow
deepened and hail began to pelt our red weather-beaten faces and finally Happy yelled from up ahead
"We're almost there now." I was
cold and wet: I got off the horse and simply led her up the trail, she
grunted a kind of groan of relief to be rid
of the weight and followed me obediently. She already had quite a load of supplies, anyway. "There she is!"
yelled Happy and in the swirled-across top-of-the-world fog I saw a funny little peaked almost Chinese cabin
among little pointy firs and boulders standing on a bald rock top surrounded
by snowbanks and patches of wet grass with tiny flowers.
I gulped. It was too dark and
dismal to like it. "This will be my home and restingplace all
summer?"
We trudged on to the log corral
built by some old lookout of the thirties and tethered the animals and took
down the packs. Happy went up and took the weather door off and got the keys
and opened her up and inside it was all gray dank gloomy muddy floor with
rain-stained walls and a dismal wooden bunk with a mattress made of ropes (so
as not to at-
232
tract lightning) and the windows completely impenetrable
with dust and worst of all the floor littered with magazines torn and chewed up
by mice and pieces of groceries too and
uncountable little black balls of rat turd.
"Well,"
said Wally showing his long teeth at me, "it's gonna take you a
long time to clean up this mess, hey? Start in right now by taking all those leftover
canned goods off the shelf and running a wet soapy rag over that filthy
shelf." Which I did, and I had to do, I
was getting paid.
But good
old Happy got a roaring woodfire going in the potbelly stove and put on a pot of
water and dumped half a can of coffee in it
and yelled "Ain't nothing like real strong coffee, up in this
country boy we want coffee that'll make your hair stand on end."
I
looked out the windows: fog. "How high are we?"
"Six thousand and a half feet."
"Well
how can I see any fires? There's nothing but fog out there."
"In a
couple of days it'll all blow away and you'll be able to see for a hundred miles in every
direction, don't worry."
But I didn't believe it. I remembered Han Shan talking
about the fog on Cold Mountain, how it never went away; I began to appreciate Han Shan's hardihood. Happy
and Wally went out with me and we spent some time putting up the
anemometer pole and doing other chores, then Happy went in and started a
crackling supper on the stove frying Spam with eggs. We drank coffee deep, and
had a rich good meal. Wally unpacked the two-way battery radio and contacted
Ross Float. Then they curled up in their sleeping bags for a night's rest, on the floor, while I slept on the
damp bunk in my own bag.
233
In the morning it was still gray
fog and wind. They got the animals ready and before leaving turned and said to
me, "Well, do you still like Desolation Peak?"
And Happy: "Don't forget
what I told ya about answerin your own
questions now. And if a bar comes by and looks in your window just close
your eyes."
The windows howled as they rode
out of sight in the mist among the gnarled rock-top trees and pretty soon I
couldn't see them any more and I was alone on Desolation Peak for all I knew
for eternity, I was sure I wasn't going to come out of there alive anyway. I
was trying to see the mountains but only
occasional gaps in the blowing fog would reveal distant dim shapes. I gave up and went in and spent a
whole day cleaning out the mess in the cabin.
At night I
put on my poncho over my rain jacket and warm clothing and went out to meditate on the foggy top of the world. Here indeed was the Great Truth Cloud,
Dharmamega, the ultimate goal. I
began to see my first star at ten, and suddenly some of the white mist parted and I thought I saw mountains, immense black gooky shapes across the way,
stark black and white with snow on top, so near, suddenly, I almost
jumped. At eleven I could see the evening star over Canada, north way, and
thought I could detect an orange sash of sunset behind the fog but all this was
taken out of my mind by the sound of pack rats scratching at my cellar door. In
the attic little diamond mice skittered on black feet among oats and bits of rice and old rigs left up there
by a generation of Desolation losers. "Ugh, ow," I thought,
"will I get to like this? And if I don't, how do I get to
leave?" The only thing was to go to bed and stick my head under the down.
In
the middle of the night while half asleep I had appar-
234
ently opened my eyes a bit, and then suddenly I woke up
with my hair standing on end, I had just seen a huge black monster standing in
my window, and I looked, and it had a star over it, and it was Mount Hozomeen miles
away by Canada leaning over my backyard and
staring in my window. The fog had all blown away and it was perfect
starry night. What a mountain! It had that
same unmistakable witches' tower shape Japhy had given it in his brush
drawing of it that used to hang on the burlap wall in the flowery shack in
Corte Madera. It was built with a kind of winding rock-ledge road going around
and around, spiraling to the very top where a perfect witches' tower peakied up
and pointed to all infinity. Hozomeen, Hozomeen, the most mournful mountain I
ever seen, and the most beautiful as soon as I got to know it and saw the
Northern Lights behind it reflecting all the ice of the North Pole from the
other side of the world.
Lo, in the
morning I woke up and it was beautiful blue sunshine sky and I went out in my
alpine yard and there it was, everything Japhy said it was, hundreds of miles
of pure snow-covered rocks and virgin lakes and high timber, and below,
instead of the world, I saw a sea of marshmallow clouds flat as a roof and extending miles and
miles in every direction,
235
creaming all the valleys, what they
call low-level clouds, on my 66oo-foot pinnacle it was all far below me. I brewed coffee on the
stove and came out and warmed my mist-drenched bones in the hot sun of my
little woodsteps. I said "Tee tee" to a big furry cony and he calmly
enjoyed a minute with me gazing at the sea
of clouds. I made bacon and eggs, dug a garbage pit a hundred yards down the
trail, hauled wood and identified landmarks with my panoramic and
firefinder and named all the magic rocks and clefts, names Japhy had sung to me
so often: Jack Mountain, Mount Terror, Mount Fury, Mount Challenger, Mount Despair, Golden Horn, Sourdough, Crater Peak, Ruby, Mount Baker bigger than the
world in the western distance, Jackass Mountain, Crooked Thumb Peak, and the fabulous names of the creeks: Three Fools,
Cinnamon, Trouble, Lightning and Freezeout. And it was all mine, not
another human pair of eyes in the world were looking at this immense cycloramic
universe of matter. I had a tremendous sensation of its dreamlikeness which
never left me all that summer and in fact grew and grew, especially when I
stood on my head to circulate my blood,
right on top of the mountain, using a burlap bag for a head mat, and
then the mountains looked like little
bubbles hanging in the void upsidedown. In fact I realized they were
upsidedown and I was upside-down! There was nothing here to hide the fact of
gravity holding us all intact upsidedown against a surface globe of earth in
infinite empty space. And suddenly I realized I was truly alone and had nothing
to do but feed myself and rest and amuse
myself, and nobody could criticize. The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one
had asked them to grow, or me to grow. In
the afternoon the marshmallow roof of clouds blew away
236
in patches and Ross Lake was open to my sight, a beautiful
cerulean pool far below with tiny toy boats of vacationists, the boats themselves too far to see, just the
pitiful little tracks they left
rilling in the mirror lake. You could see pines reflected upsidedown in
the lake pointing to infinity. Late afternoon I lay in the grass with all that glory before me and grew a little bored
and thought "There's nothing there because I don't care." Then I
jumped up and began singing and dancing and whistling
through my teeth far across Lightning Gorge and it was too immense for
an echo. Behind the shack was a huge snowfield
that would provide me with fresh drinking water till September, just a
bucket a day let melt in the house, to dip into
with a tin cup, cold ice water. I was feeling happier than in years and years,
since childhood, I felt deliberate and glad and solitary. "Buddy-o, yiddam, diddam dee," I sang, walking around
kicking rocks. Then my first sunset came and it was unbelievable. The mountains
were covered with pink snow, the clouds were distant and frilly and like
ancient remote cities of Buddhaland
splendor, the wind worked incessantly, whish, whish, booming at times,
rattling my ship. The new moon disk was prognathic and secretly funny in the
pale plank of blue over the monstrous shoulders of haze that rose from Ross
Lake. Sharp jags popped up from behind slopes, like childhood mountains I grayly drew. Somewhere, it seemed, a golden festival of rejoicement was taking
place. In my diary I wrote, "Oh I'm happy!" In the late day
peaks I saw the hope. Japhy had been right.
As darkness
enveloped my mountain and soon it would be night again and stars and Abominable Snowman stalking on Hozomeen, I started a cracking fire in the stove
and baked delicious rye muffins and
mixed up a good beef stew. A high west
237
wind buffeted the shack, it was well built with steel rods going down into concrete pourings, it wouldn't
blow away. I was satisfied. Every time I'd look out the windows I'd see alpine firs with snowcapped backgrounds, blinding
mists, or the lake below all riffled and moony like a toy bathtub lake. I made myself a little bouquet of lupine and
mountain posies and put them in a coffee cup with water. The top of Jack
Mountain was done in by silver clouds. Sometimes I'd see flashes of lightning far away, illuminating
suddenly the unbelievable horizons.
Some mornings there was fog and my ridge, Starvation Ridge, would be milkied over completely.
On the dot the following Sunday
morning, just like the first, daybreak
revealed the sea of flat shining clouds a thousand feet below me. Every
time I felt bored I rolled another cigarette
out of my can of Prince Albert; there's nothing better in the world than a
roll-your-own deeply enjoyed without hurry.
I paced in the bright silver stillness with pink horizons in the west,
and all the insects ceased in honor of the moon. There were days that were hot
and miserable with locusts of plagues of
insects, winged ants, heat, no air, no clouds, I couldn't understand how
the top of a mountain in the North could be so
hot. At noon the only sound in the world was the symphonic hum of a
million insects, my friends. But night would come and with it the mountain moon and the lake would be moon-laned
and I'd go out and sit in the grass and meditate facing west, wishing there were a Personal God in all this impersonal matter. I'd go out to my snowfield and dig out my
jar of purple Jello and look at the white moon through it. I could feel
the world rolling toward the moon. At night while I was in my bag, the deer would come up from the lower timber
and nibble at leftovers in tin
plates in the yard: bucks with wide antlers,
238
does, and cute little fawns looking like otherworldly mammals
on another planet with all that moonlight rock behind them.
Then would
come wild lyrical drizzling rain, from the south, in the
wind, and I'd say "The taste of rain, why kneel?" and I'd say "Time for hot coffee and
a cigarette, boys," addressing my
imaginary bhikkus. The moon became full and huge and with it came Aurora
Borealis over Mount Hozomeen ("Look at the void and it is even stiller," Han Shan had said in Japhy's translation); and in fact I was so still all I
had to do was shift my crossed legs
in the alpine grass and I could hear the hoofs of deers running away somewhere.
Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I
could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain
beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and
Plantagenets was built out of the
primordial essence. Sometimes I'd get mad because things didn't work out
well, I'd spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or
one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I'd be so mad I'd want to bite the mountaintops and would come
in the shack and kick the cupboard
and hurt my toe. But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be
bugged, the circumstances of existence are
pretty glorious.
All I had to do was keep an eye
on all horizons for smoke and run the two-way radio and sweep the floor. The
radio didn't bother me much; there were no fires close enough for me to report
ahead of anybody else and I didn't participate in the lookout chats. They
dropped me a couple of radio
239
batteries by parachute but my own batteries were still in
good shape.
One night in
a meditation vision Avalokitesvara the Hearer and Answerer of Prayer said to me "You are empowered
to remind people that they are utterly free" so I laid my hand on myself to remind myself first and then felt
gay, yelled "Ta," opened my eyes, and a shooting star shot.
The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words.
I ate my soup in little doleful
bowlfuls and it tasted much better than in some vast tureen . . . my
Japhy pea-and-bacon soup. I took two-hour naps every afternoon, waking up and
realizing "none of this ever happened" as I looked around my
mountaintop. The world was upsidedown hanging in an ocean of endless space and here were all these people sitting in theaters
watching movies, down there in the world to which I would return. . . .
Pacing in the yard at dusk, singing "Wee Small Hours," when I came to the lines "when the whole wide world
is fast asleep" my eyes filled with tears. "Okay world," I said,
"I'll love ya." In bed at night, warm and happy in my bag on
the good hemp bunk, I'd see my table and my clothes in the moonlight and feel,
"Poor Raymond boy, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it's such a haunted and
pitiful thing to have to live" and on this I'd go to sleep like a lamb.
Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own
life, to see it proved? . . . But
cold morning would return, with clouds billowing out of Lightning Gorge
like giant smoke, the lake below still cerulean neutral, and empty space the
same as ever. O gnashing teeth of earth,
where would it all lead to but
240
some sweet golden eternity, to prove that we've all been
wrong, to prove that
the proving itself was nil ...
August
finally came in with a blast that shook my house and augured little augusticity. I made raspberry
Jello the color of rubies in the setting
sun. Mad raging sunsets poured in
seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of
hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere
awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of
infinity, anchored to a rock. To the east,
it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron
fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to
the south, my father's mist. Jack Mountain,
his thousand-foot rock hat overlooked a hundred football fields of snow. Cinnamon Creek was an eyrie of
Scottish fog. Shull lost itself in the Golden Horn of Bleak. My oil lamp
burned in infinity. "Poor gentle
flesh," I realized, "there is nc answer." I didn't know
anything any more, I didn't care, and it didn't matter, and suddenly I felt
really free. Then would come really freezing mornings, cracking fire, I'd chop
wood with my hat on (earmuff cap), and
would feel lazy and wonderful indoors, fogged in by icy clouds. Rain,
thunder in the mountains, but in front of
the stove I read my Western maga-
241
zines. Everywhere snowy air and
woodsmoke. Finally the snow came, in a whirling shroud from Hozomeen by Canada, it came
surling my way sending radiant white heralds through which I saw the angel of
light peep, and the wind rose, dark low clouds rushed up as out of a forge,
Canada was a sea of meaningless mist; it
came in a general fanning attack advertised by the sing in my stovepipe; it
rammed it, to absorb my old blue sky view which had been all thoughtful
clouds of gold; far, the rum dum dum of Canadian thunder; and to the south
another vaster darker storm closing in like a pincer; but Hozomeen mountain stood there returning the attack with a
surl of silence. And nothing could induce the gay golden horizons far northeast
where there was no storm, to change places with Desolation. Suddenly a green
and rose rainbow shafted right down into Starvation Ridge not three hundred
yards away from my door, like a bolt, like a pillar: it came among steaming clouds and orange sun turmoiling.
What is a rainbow, Lord?
A hoop
For the lowly.
It hooped right into Lightning
Creek, rain and snow fell simultaneous, the
lake was milkwhite a mile below, it was just too crazy. I went outside and
suddenly my shadow was ringed by the rainbow as I walked on the hilltop,
a lovely-haloed mystery making me want to
pray. "O Ray, the career of your life is like a raindrop in the
illimitable ocean which is eternal awakenerhood. Why worry ever any
more? Write and tell Japhy that." The storm went away as swiftly as it
came and the late afternoon lake-sparkle
blinded me. Late afternoon, my mop drying on the rock. Late afternoon,
my bare back cold as I stood above the world in a snowfield digging shovelsful
242
into a pail. Late afternoon, it was I
not the void that changed. Warm rose dusk, I meditated in the yellow half moon
of August. Whenever
I heard thunder in the mountains it was like the iron of my mother's love.
"Thunder and snow, how we shall go!" I'd sing. Suddenly came the
drenching fall rains, all-night rain,
millions of acres of Bo-trees being washed and washed, and in my attic millennial rats wisely sleeping.
Morning, the definite feel of
autumn coming, the end of my job coming,
wild windy cloud-crazed days now, a definite golden look in the high
noon haze. Night, made hot cocoa and sang by
the woodfire. I called Han Shan in the mountains: there was no answer. I
called Han Shan in the morning fog: silence, it said. I called: Dipankara
instructed me by saying nothing. Mists blew
by, I closed my eyes, the stove did the talking. "Woo!" I
yelled, and the bird of perfect balance on the fir point just moved his tail;
then he was gone and distance grew immensely white. Dark wild nights with hint
of bears: down in my garbage pit old soured
solidified cans of evaporated milk bitten into and torn apart by mighty
behemoth paws: Avalokitesvara the Bear.
Wild cold fogs with awesome holes. On my calendar I ringed off the fifty-fifth
day.
My hair was long, my eyes pure
blue in the mirror, my skin tanned and
happy. All night gales of soaking rain again, autumn rain, but I warm as toast
in my bag dreaming of long infantry-scouting
movements in the mountains; cold wild morning with high wind, racing
fogs, racing clouds, sudden bright suns,
the pristine light on hill patches and my fire roaring with three big logs as I exulted to hear
Burnie Byers over the radio telling all his lookouts to come down that very
day. The season was over. I paced in the windy yard with cup of coffee
forked in my thumb singing "Blubbery dubbery the
243
chipmunk's in the grass." There
he was, my chipmunk, in the bright clear windy sunny air staring on the
rock; hands clasping
he sat up straight, some little oat between his paws; he nibbled, he darted away, the little nutty lord of
all he surveyed. At dusk, big wall of
clouds from the north coming in. "Brrr," I said. And I'd sing
"Yar, but my she was yar!" meaning my
shack all summer, how the wind hadn't blown it away, and I said "Pass pass pass, that which passes
through everything!" Sixty sunsets had I seen revolve on that
perpendicular hill. The vision of the freedom of eternity was mine forever. The
chipmunk ran into the rocks and a butterfly
came out. It was as simple as that. Birds flew over the shack rejoicing;
they had a mile-long patch of sweet
blueberries all the way down to the timberline. For the last time I went
out to the edge of Lightning Gorge where the little outhouse was built right on
the precipice of a steep gulch. Here, sitting every day for sixty days, in fog or in moonlight or in sunny day
or in darkest night, I had always seen the little twisted gnarly trees
that seemed to grow right out of the midair rock.
And
suddenly it seemed I saw that unimaginable little Chinese bum
standing there, in the fog, with that expressionless humor on his seamed face. It
wasn't the real-life Japhy of rucksacks and
Buddhism studies and big mad parties at Corte Madera, it was the
realer-than-life Japhy of my dreams, and he
stood there saying nothing. "Go away, thieves of the mind!" he
cried down the hollows of the unbelievable Cascades. It was Japhy who had advised me to come here and now though he was
seven thousand miles away in Japan answering the meditation bell (a little bell he later sent to my mother in the mail, just because she was my mother, a gift to
please her) he seemed to be standing on Desolation Peak by the gnarled old
244
rocky trees certifying and justifying
all that was here. "Japhy," I said out loud, "I don't know when we'll meet again
or what'll happen in the future, but
Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever
for guiding me to the place where I learned
all. Now comes the sadness of coming
back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of
bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God
bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we
know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping." Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and
I said "God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant
it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or
the other."
To the children and the innocent it's all the same.
And in keeping with Japhy's habit
of always getting down on one knee and
delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer
of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was
hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said
"Thank you, shack." Then I added "Blah," with a little
grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail
back to this world.
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LOOK FOR
THESE CLASSICS BY THE BEAT GENERATION'S ANGEL-HEADED HIPSTER
BIG SUR
"A humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages
of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac.... Here we meet San Francisco's poets
& recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. . . . Here
at the peak of his suffering, humorous genius, Kerouac wrote through his misery
to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended on the hallucinatory Sounds of the
Pacific Ocean at Big Sur." —Allen Ginsberg
ISBN 0-14-016812-5 THE DHARMA BUMS
Two ebullient young
men search for Truth the Zen way: From yabyum and poetry in
Berkeley,
Marin County, and San Francisco, to solitude in the High Sierras and a vigil
atop
Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after Kerouac's On
the
Road
put
the Beat Generation on the literary map, The Dharma Bums helped launch
the "rucksack revolution." ISBN
0-14-004252-0
JACK KEROUAC Selected
Letters: 1940-1956
Edited by Ann Charters
Written between 1940, when Kerouac was a
freshman at college, and 1956, immediately before his leap into celebrity with the publication of On
the Road, these personal, truthful, and
mesmerizing letters offer valuable insights into his family life, friendships,
travels, love affairs, and literary apprenticeship. ISBN 0-14-023444-6
ON THE ROAD
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty roar
across America in the novel that defined the Beat Generation and changed the
course of American writing. "The Huckleberry Finn of the mid-twentieth century." (The New
York Times Book Review) ISBN 0-14-004259-8
THE
PORTABLE JACK KEROUAC
Edited by Ann Charters
Planned by the author before his death and completed by
biographer Ann Charters, this anthology makes clear the ambition and
accomplishment of Kerouac's work. It presents selections from the "Legend
of Duluoz" novels in chronological order, and also includes poetry, letters, and essays on Buddhism, writing, and the
Beat Generation.
ISBN 0-14-017819-8 TRISTESSA
Alien Ginsberg
described this gem of a short novel as "A narrative meditation study
ing a hen, a rooster, a dove,
a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing,
ravished junky lady, first in their crowded
bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco
stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums." ISBN
0-14-016811-7
VISIONS OF GERARD
The scenes and sensations of childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts,
as revealed in the
brief, tragic-happy life of Kerouac's saintly brother, Gerard. Visions of
Gerard is an
unsettling, beautiful, and sad exploration
of the meaning of existence.
ISBN 0-14-014452-8
KEROUAC IN HARDCOVER (editor's choice)
ON THE ROAD
Hailed by The New York Times as the most beautifully
executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet of the Beat
Generation, On the Road is the kind of book people read, reread, and take
to heart. Experience anew the classic story that broke open conformist
1950s America. This beautiful hardcover
edition has been published to celebrate On the Road's fortieth
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edition fans now own.
ISBN 0-670-87478-7
SOME OF THE DHARMA
Written at the height of Kerouac's commitment to Buddhism, Some
of the Dharma confirms that he was not only "on the road" but
also "on the path." Begun as reading notes for Alien Ginsberg, the
book evolved into a vast and all-encompassing work of experimental non-fiction
into which Kerouac poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers,
journal entries, meditations, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, overheard conversations, sketches,
blues, and more. An intricate word mosaic, it is visually complex: each
page is unique, filled with patterns and interlocking pieces of text.
ISBN 0-670-84877-8
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