The Great Northern Express (12 page)

One day at school the following week, my seniors became involved in a discussion over which wild animal was the fiercest. Polar bear, Becca said. Another student had read that, ounce for ounce, the fiercest animal on earth was the tiny shrew. They were interested to learn that the Romans, putting the question to the test in the Colosseum, had discovered that with a single swipe, a European brown bear could break the neck of the largest lion. Bill the brain pointed out that man himself was no slouch when it came to sheer savagery, citing not only Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun but a recent account he'd read of the Battle of Gettysburg. Yet the fiercest, most fearless wild animal I have ever seen was a bird that Phillis and I encountered in the winter woods of the Kingdom.

The early winter of 1964–65 was, we were told, an especially rough one throughout Vermont, with even deeper cold and more snow than usual. It was also one of those winters when the snowshoe-hare population in the far Canadian north had reached a low point, driving boreal hawks and owls south for
food. Early in December, in a small birch tree overlooking a field on the edge of Orleans, we spotted a great gray owl, ordinarily a denizen of the Canadian taiga, surveying the countryside with his huge, spectacled eyes. Next, snowy owls began to appear. One took up a vigil atop the TV antenna of the downtown theater in Newport, making an occasional foray out over Lake Memphremagog to scavenge the discarded heads of perch and smelt scattered around ice-fishing shanties. Sadly, some Kingdom outlaw shot it. Just over the border in Canada was a commercial pheasant farm. When a snowy began snatching pheasants for dinner, the owner stretched a tough netting material across the top of the pen. The white owl crashed into the net, which sagged down onto the pheasants, then it yanked one of the captive birds through the hole it had ripped and soared off with its prey.

One twilight when Phillis and I were skiing along a logging trail, we came upon a great snowy devouring a freshly killed hare just ahead in the path. Mantling over the bloody rabbit, the owl arched its wings, as if defying us to take another step, and stared at us with its great yellow eyes. After a minute it flew into a nearby spruce tree, and we circled out around it. A few yards down the trail, we looked back. The bird had returned to its meal and was busy pulling out the rabbit's innards. Hurrah for great snowy owls! Hurrah for the Northeast Kingdom!

It was dark when we came out of the woods and looked down on the lights of the village that was becoming our home. How could we ever leave a place so rich in friends, wilderness and wildlife, history and stories? Like the sleigh driver in the Frost poem, I had promises to keep, to myself and to Phillis, to move on and become a writer. But I was feeling torn between those hopes and my growing attachment to the Kingdom, where I was beginning to find my material, if not yet my voice. Skiing back
down the mountain, I vowed to myself to make a renewed effort to finish writing our landlady's moonshining story and a deer-poaching tale I'd started recently. If I could muster just a fraction of the determination and single-mindedness of the Arctic owl we'd encountered, I could write those stories.

The night before, poring over Jim Hayford's copy of
The Life of Samuel Johnson
, I'd come across Johnson's oft-cited remark to Boswell on their great journey to the Hebrides: “A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it.” Hadn't Jim—my personal Dr. Johnson—said that it all came down to application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair?

I went home and doggedly applied the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair and wrote straight through the night, finishing both stories. They were a start. Dr. Johnson had also said that the art of writing was “attained by slow degrees.” Except, perhaps, for the Battle-ax's remark to us, there was no blueprint waiting out there, in graduate school or anywhere else. And there sure as hell weren't any shortcuts. I realized that I was flying on hope alone.

He was propped up against the rickety headboard of the other bed in our Motel 6 room on the outskirts of Austin, still wearing his boots and hat, a Corona wedged between the torn-out knees of his jeans, telling me his story, which sounded like some footloose loser's in a Kris Kristofferson song.

The West Texas Jesus (Spanish pronunciation
hay-zeus
) was an out-of-work carpenter. Weekends he played pedal steel and sang backup in a five-piece Texas band. You know, the kind that performs in roadhouses behind chicken wire strung up to protect them from flying beer bottles? Though he didn't come right out and say so, I strongly suspected he'd been kicked out of the group for chronic drunkenness. Like his namesake, my Jesus was full of stories and advice, solicited and otherwise. As for his singing, well, the old
caballero
tried to sound like Kristofferson. But where Kris's voice was gravelly, this guy's was simply shot
from tens of thousands of unfiltered Luckies and more six-packs than a body could count.

Here we were, then, on a Sunday evening in a cheap motor court in Austin, home of
Austin City Limits
as well as a lively literary community centered around BookPeople Bookstore, including the three book people who'd made up the entire audience at my reading there earlier in the evening. That's right. My Austin fan base consisted of the store's events coordinator, her assistant, who was “in and out” (mostly out), and my former next-door neighbor from back in the Kingdom, who'd recently moved to Texas. Plainly, the farther I ventured from New England, the tougher it was going to be to generate good audiences.

“Look, Mosher, speaking of hope,” the West Texas Jesus said, slinging a red-bound Gideon Bible over onto the standard Motel 6 purple coverlet on my bed—which coverlets, I'd heard, got washed every six months whether they needed it or not. “You're hoping for answers to this touring gig, right? Flip open that Bible to any old page and read a verse. You won't believe how helpful it'll be. I do it all the time.”

I opened the Bible, at random, to Numbers 15: “While the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man who gathered sticks upon the Sabbath day … and the Lord said to Moses, the man shall be surely put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.”

“Good God!” I shouted, hurling the Gideon back at the beerdrinking Jesus. “What are you trying to tell me? That I should be stoned for doing an event on a Sunday?”

He held up his hands. “Hell, no,” he said. “If you'll remember, I changed all that when I was out gleaning somebody else's wheat one Sunday with those twelve slackers. Look here now. Try her again. Use a different book this time.”

From my stack on the bedside table he selected Elaine Pagels's interpretation of
The Secret Gospel of Thomas
, which I'd bought earlier that evening at BookPeople, mainly so that the store would be able to record at least one sale at the end of my event. He opened it to a Books-a-Million bookmark—how did
that
get in there?—and cited Thomas citing him. “He who brings forth that which is within himself will be saved by that which he brings forth. He who does not bring forth that which is within himself will be destroyed by that which he does not bring forth.”

If this admonition was meant for me, it seemed nearly as ominous as the threat from Numbers to stone me to death for reading to three people on a Sunday. What, precisely, was I supposed to “bring forth”?

I started to ask the West Texas Jesus what he'd do in my place, but he just grinned and said
he'd
begin by asking the right question.

“Which is?”

“What
you're
going to do in your place,” he said. “In the meantime, tell me a little story. You're a storyteller, aren't you? Tell me about that other time when you asked for my help. Up on that ski lift.”

“How do you know about that?” I said. The West Texas Jesus tapped his head in a canny way, cracked open another Corona, and settled back.

The conditions that morning were ideal for skiing. The temperature was about ten degrees above zero. It was clear and windless. Several inches of new snow covered the dooryard, glowing with a lovely bluish tint in the dawn light. Having finally finished a draft of our landlady's story and another story besides, I thought I'd celebrate by taking a day to go skiing. I slid my skis into our beat-up station wagon and drove to a resort a couple of hours away. I bought my lift ticket, then waited a few minutes for the chairlift to start operating. I was the first and, so far, the only customer.

I'd chosen a medium-length trail, somewhere between half and three-quarters of a mile long, and it appeared that I'd have it entirely to myself, at least for the first run down. Though noticeably colder here on the mountain, it was a splendid morning. As I rose, effortlessly, up the slope, I counted more than twenty
other peaks, their snowy tops glowing as pink as strawberry ice cream in the sunrise. Already I was anticipating the matchless exhilaration of a clean, swooping downhill run on brand-new powdery snow.

Floating up the mountain fifteen to twenty feet over the tops of snow-laden evergreens, I shivered slightly. Like many local skiers, I scorned fashionable ski wear, and instead was dressed in long johns, wool pants, a couple of flannel shirts under a sweater, a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, and a red wool hunting cap with earflaps. A breeze had come up, and the air sparkled with crystalline flakes of ice, like hoar frost. Each time the chair rolled under a lift tower, it made a small thud, like a kiddie ride at a fair. Riding a chairlift is like going up in a safe and stable Ferris wheel at an innocent country carnival.

The lift line inclined at a steeper slant. My chair stopped. All the chairs on the lift stopped. It was totally silent. Alone in midair, I was out of sight of the ski lodge below and the landing deck on the mountaintop above.

Of course, this had happened to me before. All ski lifts stop occasionally, usually for reasons obscure to their riders. Soon enough the chairs would start to move again, and I'd be on my way. They didn't, though, and I wasn't. I sat waiting in that big wooden-and-steel contraption, swaying in the gathering breeze, and nothing happened at all. What was I supposed to do? Call for help on my cell phone? This was 1964. My feet were getting cold. So were my mittened hands. I stamped one foot, then the other, on the metal ski rest, rattling my wooden skis like deer antlers. There was no response, just the enveloping, now vaguely unsettling, silence. I noticed that it had begun to snow. The breeze had picked up into a gusting wind.

Higher up the slope, a grooming machine on caterpillar
treads emerged from the thickening snowflakes. I waved my hunting cap at the driver, who looked warm and content inside his glass-enclosed cab. He took a sip from a large blue thermos as I signaled frantically. He glanced up at me, smiled, and waved back. Then he swung off onto a parallel trail for advanced skiers and started back up the mountainside.

In no particular order, I began to catalog the things I had not done in my twenty-one short years. Fish the rivers of Labrador. Have kids with Phillis. Publish a story. God in heaven, right now I'd settle for getting my stiffening feet back on terra firma again.

I swore,
swore
, that if the powers that be would let me live to revise Verna's moonshining story (yes, and publish it), I would never again waste a precious morning in such a frivolous way. What the hell was the matter with me? This wasn't a life-or-death situation. Was it? It was getting colder by the minute. And exactly who was I beseeching to come to my rescue? In the King James Bible, God is recorded as laughing just once. I could see the old boy we'd been teaching our Sunday school kids about, with His fiery punishments and stern injunctions, laughing again this morning. Laughing at me, stuck up here
freezing to death on a goddamn chairlift
.

A desperate strategy occurred to me. It was hard to estimate, but I guessed I was suspended thirty-five to forty feet above the ground. Itinerant roofers I'd worked with in college—a hard-bitten outfit, if I do say so—had a grim adage. With luck, they liked to say, a man might survive a twenty- or even a twenty-five-foot fall. Thirty feet was considered the cutoff point, the gateway to that bourne from which few men, even hard-bitten roofers, return. But if I unclasped my bindings, kicked out of my skis, and hung from the footrest by my hands, I could perhaps
get into that thirty- to thirty-five-foot range where survival was still an outside possibility. There were, after all, less yielding surfaces than snow to fall on.

It was storming harder. The narrow corridor of trail through the woods below was filling up with new snow. Whose woods they were I knew very well—they belonged to the Christly corporation that owned the resort and the mountain, whose lift operators were even now drinking coffee, gabbing, checking the scores of last night's high school basketball games in the morning paper. That was it! No other skiers had shown up yet, so in the absence of customers,
they had shut off the lift and forgotten all about me
. Enough. I'd give the doughnut-eating bastards five minutes, not a second more. Then, while I still had some faint sensation left in my hands, I'd make the plunge. Maybe I was only thirty feet off the ground, which did seem closer in the snow squall, didn't it? No, it did not. Was this pickle I was in a metaphor for my first year as a teacher? Or for the apprenticeship of an aspiring novelist? I didn't know or care. I just wanted to get off that chairlift, and off that mountain, alive.

“Wouldn't you?” I said to the West Texas Jesus, on the outskirts of Austin, forty-some years later.

Nothing. I repeated the question. No response. What a comedown. The guy had fallen asleep right in the middle of my story, leaving me hanging up there in the wind and snow, at the mercy of the elements and our heavenly father.