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Jack Kerouac
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 pan-theon 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
4
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 un-successful 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
after-noon 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 concep-tions
about charity, for charity after all is just a word." I was very devout in those days and was practicing my
religious de-votions almost to
perfection. Since then I've become a little hy-pocritical 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 hu-mility and zeal and
neutral tranquillity and wisdom and ec-stasy, 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 every-thing 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 cross-ing, 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 mac-aroni 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, sing-ing, 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 cross-legged 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, spoon-ing up rich bites of hot beans and pork, or
of macaroni with
8
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 num-ber 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 min-ute 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 mid-dle 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
9
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 anthropol-ogy and later in Indian myth and in the actual texts of
Indian mythology. Finally he learned Chinese and Japanese and be-came 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
In-dian songs and general folksong interests.
I first saw him walk-ing 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
11
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 Ren-aissance
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 stand-ing 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 sec-ondhand 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 knap-sack 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 no-ticed 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 expe-riences 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 orna-menting this world with my sincerity. We had the same favor-ite
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 inter-ested 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 suffer-ing.) 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-
13
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 Bud-dha 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 Bud-dhist,
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 concen-trate 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 im-portant things, the night of the birth of
the San Francisco Poe-try 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
stand-ing 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 ev-erybody 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 an-imals, 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 bar-room 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
proc-esses" though where Coughlin did say that revelation was a personal thing I noticed the strong Buddhist and
idealistic feel-ing 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 deli-cate 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
16
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 hap-pened
to be Japhy's favorite Chinese restaurant, Nam Yuen, and he showed me how to
order and how to eat with chop-sticks 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.
17
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, every-thing 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 swing-ing
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
18
toward the campus of the University of
California, behind an-other 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 appur-tenances 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 com-pact
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 quad-ruple-volume
edition of Japanese haikus. He also had an im-mense 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 under-shirts, jeans, workshirts, moccasin shoes, and a few
turtleneck sweaters that he wore one on top the other in the cold moun-tain
nights of the High Sierras in California and the High Cas-cades 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
19
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 sec-ond, and the third, are really wild and ecstatic."
2О
"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 moun-tains."
"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 moun-tain, 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 moun-tains 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 sprout-ing 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 Bud-dhist 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 break-fast and I
always meditate a long time in the afternoon unless I'm interrupted."
"Who
interrupts you?"
"Oh,
people. Coughlin sometimes, and Alvah came yester-day, 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 Sturla-son 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 archi-tectural 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 screw-ing,
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 jump-ing 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 re-minded 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 with-out 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 her-self.
"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.
"Prin-cess 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 Prin-cess, 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 cere-mony, 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 in-comparable
pretties of Indian Mexico. And the absence of ac-tive 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
ЗО
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 celi-bacy 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 "Bod-hisattva" 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 In-dia," 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? Be-sides 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 chant-ing 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 be-coming 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 pet-tishly. 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 interest-ing
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 noth-ing 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 miser-able 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 snor-ing 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 wor-ried 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 choco-late 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 feel-ing
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 Co-lumbia, 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 crapu-lous 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 be-spectacled
fellow of great learning but an eccentric himself, more eccentric and outre than Japhy on the campus, a librar-ian,
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 him-self 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 him-self 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 side-walks
like a couple of oldtime Hollywood silent film come-dians, 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 some-thing 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 West-erners 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 lan-guage used as the diplomatic one
for the Levant. This was be-cause 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 sec-onds 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 sim-ple. 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 splen-dors 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 head-lamps,
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
crea-ture 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 some-times 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 hap-pily
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 Bene-dictine 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 ass-holes," 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 morn-ing 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 ap-pears 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 to-ward me, and around the other side, all under the ice-cold stars and loveliness, while Japhy snored, Japhy
who wasn't sub-jected to all the mad wiggling. Finally Morley couldn't
sleep at all and got up and went to the car probably to talk to him-self 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 mo-ments 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
5О
beautiful morning-red pristine shafts of sunlight coming in
over the hill and slanting down into the cold trees like ca-thedral 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 morn-ing and the Morley of last night, except his voice as he rat-tled 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 coun-try 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 conversa-tion. 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 se-cret 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 Bridge-port and buy a sleeping
bag or at least a canvas cover or tar-paulin 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 avail-able and the only thing to do was to borrow a couple of
blank-ets 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 Bod-hisattva's head and can tell his history from studying it. Ti-betan in
origin."
I had
on the tennis sneakers and now I whipped out my mountainclimbing' cap for the
day, which Japhy
had con-signed 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 mak-ing 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 com-ing 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 observa-tion 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 cater-pillars 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 si-lent 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 for-get 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 real-ized
it was a kind of blessing in disguise Morley had for-gotten 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 boy-hood 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 Chap-lin, to make a kind
of easier flapthwap as he trudged. We went across a kind of muddy
riverbottom through dense under-growth 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 sud-denly 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 under-stand the perfect gems of haikus the Oriental poets had writ-ten,
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 be-low . . . 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?"
60
"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 Cali-fornia
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 climb-ing 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
circum-stances 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 drift-ing 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
hud-dled 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 be-hind 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 thou-sand
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 get-ting 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 grace-fully 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 grow-ing 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 occupa-tion,
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 cov-ered 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 mean-while, 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 actu-ally 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 Juras-sic
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 an-gers 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 be-hind 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 moun-tain 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
cross-legged 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 an-other 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 moun-tains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that
mat-ter 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 dia-mond 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 every-thing 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 reassur-ingly 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 alco-hol, I'd forgotten all about it,
the altitude was too high, the ex-ercise
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 sur-vival 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 wis-dom 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 un-countable than all your favorite Surangamy
sutries, boy." So he whips out
his star map and turns it around a little, and ad-justs, 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 for-ward 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 an-other
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 far-ther 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 dis-covered 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 com-ments 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 wait-ing.
"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 in-vestigate 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 any-way, 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 get-ting that
later more golden look and a wind was rising and I began to
think "By gosh how we ever gonna climb that moun-tain, 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 any-way. 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 jock-strap, 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 im-mediately 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 morn-ing 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 dou-ble-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 el-evator,
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 moun-tain 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-conquer-ing Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy. It was
beautiful. It was funny, too, up here on the not-so-funny top of Cal-ifornia
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 run-ning
down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted
heels, bounc-ing 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 run-ning 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 sneak-ers, 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 Mor-ley 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 beau-tiful 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 moun-tain 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 moun-tain 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 as-sign 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 fol-lowed 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 fol-low 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 some-times 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 ruck-sack, 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 roar-ing 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-
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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 re-turned 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 selec-tion. The
menu was huge and good: mountain trout and every-thing. 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, god-dammit, 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 ministra-tions 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 sud-denly
(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 im-possibly 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 Cough-lin, 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 every-thing 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 Cal-ifornia: "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 car-ries
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 al-ii ways my real heroes and will always be. They're
constantly on the alert in the realness
which might as well be real as un-real,
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. Hand-cuffs
will get soft and billy clubs will topple over, let's go on being free anyhow."
"The
President of the United States suddenly grows cross-eyed and
floats away!" I yell.
"And
anchovies will turn to dust!" yells Coughlin.
"The Golden Gate is creaking
with sunset rust," says Al-vah.
"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 wander-ers, Dharma Bums
refusing to subscribe to the general de-mand 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 ap-pear 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 to-gether
to drink and talk and pray, think of the waves of salva-tion 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
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from your heels clear up and concentrate saying to your-self 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 any-body 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, home-spun
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 hap-pen 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 mid-night 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 some-where
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; no-body 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 Luna-tics 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 win-dows 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 soli-tude 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 un-dershirts, 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 fa-mous 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
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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, other-wise 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." Every-body 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 some-times, 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 shud-dering 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
111
to people, Alvah, my mother, my
relatives, girl friends, every-body, 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 discrimina-tions 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 en-joy
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
112
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 sand-wiches and drinking some tea I'd
brewed her. The musi-cians 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 win-dow
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 out-spread howling out a tremendous sermon in a
booming voice
114
that kept breaking from speech to
blues-singing music, beau-tiful, 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 morn-ing 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 dis-appeared
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 al-most 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. Sling-ing 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 peace-ful singing stars.
It took exactly the entire
twenty-five miles to get out of the smog of Los Angeles; the sun was clear in
River-side. 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 pa-tients 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 tomor-row, when I'd hitchhike on through the
other side of town. I saw many cop cruising
cars and they were looking at me sus-piciously: 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 hesi-tated 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 In-dian 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 regu-lar
Don Quixote of tenderness. In the morning I felt exhil-arated 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 fu-ture, 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 immedi-ately 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 am-bling 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 lit-tle
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 dream-ing 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-recur-ring 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 eve-ning 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
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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 any-thing 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 Mexi-cali 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. Some-where 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 com-ing 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 beau-tiful Atascadero Indian country in the
uphills of New Mexico beautiful green valleys and pines and New England-like
roll-ing 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 Christ-mas 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 ear-drum (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 Okla-homa where we had roast pork and yams worthy of my
131
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 Mon-day, 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 coun-try 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 hitch-hiking out of Springfield figuring to catch the bus in a town farther
down, just for fun, and froze my feet and hands stand-ing 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
ar-rived. Then it was a crowded bus going
slowly over the moun-tains 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 moth-er's house in Big Easonburg Woods which is a
country cross-road 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
133
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 stretch-ing 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-
134
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 medi-tate.
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 to-ward 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 At-lantic 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 re-vealed
to me "This thinking has stopped" and I sighed be-cause I didn't have to think any more and felt my
whole body sink into a blessedness surely to be believed, completely re-laxed 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,
135
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 congre-gations, 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 Christ-mas
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. . . ."
136
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 exist-ence?" 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 pac-ing in the cold windy darkness of
the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the
ground and cried
137
"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 realiz-able 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
138
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, pro-vided 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 look-ing 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 mor-tal
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.
140
Spring came
after heavy rains that washed every-thing, 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 judg-ment 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 mo-ment. "Okay,
but make it up right away, just as you go along."
141
"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; look-ing 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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