The Other (19 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you doing?”

“I don’t want to participate.”

“Participate in what?”

“In anything.”

His new overalls and flannel shirt, from Swain’s, made him look like a character from
Oklahoma!
while he sat on his rock examining his hands with more rigor, I thought, than they warranted. Behind him was the Strait of Juan de Fuca, some stars, and a container ship. I said, “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“I don’t get you.”

“I don’t get you, either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Idiot,” said John William. “You’ve got your whole life in front of you, maybe fifty or sixty years. And what are you going to do with that? Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money, and then die?”

“No.”

“Neither am I,” said John William.

In the morning, I took notes while my professor gave an overview, up through the transcendentalists, of literature in America—its Puritan beginnings, the period of the deists, and the transcendentalists themselves, with their optimism—my professor said—goaded forward by the land westward that remained unknown to them. The idea seemed to me dubious. It still does, because a lot of people are indifferent to the unknown, and some are terrified of it, too—unknown lands aren’t by definition a reason to look on the bright side. So I considered this opening lecture a little unsatisfying and later, at the library, dug around about this question of transcendentalism in relation to the westward unknown, but there was so much there about related things that I couldn’t keep my original question in mind and got sidetracked, and really, this has been the story of my life, this sort of digression from what I intended, a manner of living that’s upsetting in a fundamental way, so that at times I’ve thought of striking out on a new path. But which path would that be? That’s now my $440-million question.
COUNTRYMAN—GET OUT HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
. There was more to that than I realized.

5

A
LL
A
BOUT THE
B
ENJAMINS

I
CAN’T SAY HOW MANY TIMES
John William swung his pick in order to excavate his cave. I do know that I hiked there frequently with heavy loads, and most of the time found him swinging it. Once, though, arriving in the evening, I found him sitting with a book I’d left under his tarp called
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.
Reading, John William looked like a character from the Brothers Grimm—the long hair and beard, the candle and book, the pool in the woods, the fire behind him and the cave overhead, the rising rock wall, and the dark trees. I said, “Some of those poems are good.”

He put the book down.

Working on his cave, John William developed big arms and a hulking back. He didn’t sweat as much as I did, but his sweat was gamier. One day, while helping him—or pretending to help him, because I still felt strongly that this project was folly—I suggested dynamite. I said we could pound holes in the rock and fill them with explosives. I was fantasizing about a way out because the work was so hard. I was also confronting a truly onerous tedium, which had come to include me against my will. In sum, I hated pick work. With pick work, each blow reverberates in the forearms, and as the day wears on, the curved head becomes heavier and the tool feels out of balance; whereas earlier there might have been a crushing exactitude, now there’s only flailing. I think of the chain gangs portrayed in films, bent along roads or in dusty fields, dressed in stripes and slowed by leg-irons, generally beneath a terrible sun, and though they often wield shovels or hoes, it’s the swing of picks that comes readily to mind as a natural feature of this celluloid image, because pick work is servitude, it’s penitential; I can imagine a circle of hell about pick work, but not about hoeing or shoveling. Anyway, when a day of cave building was done, John William and I sat by our flames, eating, on a lot of nights, beans and rice. There were limestone chips everywhere—they crunched underfoot and here and there caught firelight. A bluntness inhabited my hands: they felt like clubs and lost discernment. We were bug-bitten and smelled of sulfur. But we were also young and had our hot tub. Of course, this cave wasn’t really my project, and I could quit anytime, though, on the other hand, I felt compelled, or obliged, by a bond, by allegiance, and by the posture of service which, I admit, was the posture I took of my own choice toward John William.

But I was only there sporadically. My life unfolded in other places. I peddled firewood with Keith, attended school, and lived with Jamie. Gradually, I didn’t want to go to the South Fork Hoh, or I wanted to go but not urgently enough, partly because this life in town appealed to me, partly because excavating had gotten insufferable, and partly because of the rule, newly instituted by John William, that we couldn’t smoke dope until dusk. That fall of ’75, I made the pilgrimage infrequently, though always with a pack full of food—I remember buying hamhocks, pinto beans, apples, rice, and cookies, and weighing myself with and without this load, which came to seventy pounds. I also brought, on one trip, shampoo, soap, candles, toilet paper, and a can of white gas, and I laid these out on the forest floor, near the fire pit, and after a while—what choice did he have?—John William accepted my offerings and put everything under his tarp.

There were signs of progress when I went up there in November. He’d been at it for eight months now, and it showed. The chips of limestone under the cliff face had become a heap. The excavation resembled a recess for displaying classical statuary, and the rudimentary scaffolding had been buttressed and reinforced. What had earlier looked medieval in aspect now had the ambience of a credible prospecting or of a nineteenth-century mining operation. I got stoned in the morning despite the new rule, and then we took advantage of good weather for labor—cool and clear, dry with no wind—and banged away with our picks in alternate strikes that, late in the afternoon, produced intermittent sparks. There was no stopping John William, which meant I couldn’t fold. We lacked room for two up there, but by ducking expeditiously and in precarious rhythm we avoided each other and, grimly, got results. For my part, I felt possessed by the dogged futility of pick work, tried feeding on its slow advance, and was half able to mythologize myself—which toil like this requires—but I still flagged before my friend, who had better torque, a more compact swing, and endless motivation. You could hear all these distinctions in our separate reverberations. His frequency sounded more productive on every blow. That limestone niche yielded to John William less stubbornly than it did to me. I suppose my private sentiments that day must have been competitive—I probably dissipated myself in this familiar vein. However it was, flaking and chiseling, we wore ourselves down—I felt, at least, like a candle going out—and finally put the picks aside and stripped and hit the hot tub. Afterward, I cut some of the apples I’d brought into chunks and put those in the pot with the beans and rice. John William had, in his camp, cayenne pepper, and a book I hadn’t seen before, Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception,
which I read that night, its pages lit by a military-surplus headlamp I’d found at a garage sale, while he replaced a snapped pick handle. We slept by the fire, and at dawn John William said he’d dreamed of being locked in a room with a dakini while pulling at a door that wouldn’t open.

“A dakini?”

“A demoness.”

“That’s the dream?”

“There was someone on the other side of the door, trying to help.”

“Too bad,” I said, “because that’s all you’ll get out here.”

“Listen to you,” John William said. “You’re pussy-whipped.”

We hung our sleeping bags from the scaffolding and ate cookies for breakfast. At lunch, I went back to
The Doors of Perception.
John William had found a small skull in the forest, which he couldn’t identify, and neither could I. He also had what appeared to be the thigh bone of an elk or a deer, a large mandible, and what he thought were owl feathers. We scrounged distantly for firewood and filled the canteens. That afternoon, my pick head came loose, and as it rattled with each strike, I wanted to go home.

At dusk, we sat with our feet in the hot tub, breathing sulfur mist. I had a raw, oozing spot between my thumb and forefinger, and open calluses on my palms. A fleck of limestone, struck off by John William, had lodged earlier in the corner of my eye, and I’d gone to pains to dig it out, using the mirror in my compass lid, but there was still some residual complaint there, and I couldn’t see normally. I read some of Huxley, but the print was watery. We ate more rice and beans doused with cayenne, finished the cookies and apples, and lay down in our sleeping bags close to the fire. I said, at last, because I didn’t want to come to this place anymore, “Why are we doing this?”

“No one’s making you do anything.”

“Sleep in a tent.”

“I don’t want to sleep in a tent.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want peace,” said John William, “so help me out.”

I came again at Thanksgiving. There was the semblance of a cave by then. In the
Seattle Times,
the hermit’s retreat is described as “spacious”: it had to be spacious for John William to swing a pick, or for the two of us to swing our picks alternately, in lesser arcs than from the scaffolding, but nevertheless with force. Inside, in the gloom, there was no room for an overhead swing; long side-arm arcs were necessary, and these made my ribs ache. I also felt crowded and oppressed by rock, and turned often toward the light. We emerged from there coated with limestone dust, like miners, kicking out the chips with the edges of our boots; sometimes we rested with our legs dangling from the entrance, eating cold beans or crackers. We worked by lantern light on my second night there, because John William felt we’d lapsed inexcusably by napping through an afternoon; he hung the lantern, from its wire handle, on the scaffolding, and while it hissed we toiled nocturnally, like demons.

Around midnight, we got into the hot tub and, in the manner of movie mead-hall thanes, ate the greasy drumsticks I’d brought wrapped in foil. “So this is your deal,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll get snowed out.”

“True.”

“You could snowshoe.”

“Snowshoes leave a trail for the Park Service or whoever.”

I said, “You could walk in the river and up that side stream.”

“Maybe.”

“You could cache food.”

It was the sort of advice you might offer a hobbyist. At that point I thought of John William as a hobbyist—obsessive, but a hobbyist nonetheless. How else would I see it? Why would I think otherwise? He seemed to me like other kids of means who take on grueling projects at the cusp of adulthood—though instead of building a cave they usually do something like sailing to Antarctica or biking across Mongolia. To me, the pick work in the woods was in this vein of extended, masochistic recreations.

The next morning, when I got out my journal, John William said, “So you still want to be a writer, I see. You still want to write the great American novel.”

“Because I’m a cliché.”

“You want to be famous.”

“Superficial: that’s me.”

“You want immortality.”

“A novel wouldn’t make me immortal.”

“No,” John William said, “a little sustenance for the ruling class, that’s what a novel comes to, in the end.”

“Your family,” I shot back, “must own a lot of them, then.”

“Cruel wit,” said John William. “They’re honing you in the English Department.”

I left in the morning, and for a month I didn’t go to the cave anymore, or to the trailer on the Hoh, preferring my own life, preferring it unencumbered by any duty to my friend, or by the necessity I’d felt, for three and a half years now, to put up with him. Walking from building to building on campus, or reading at the library on a rainy afternoon, I thought I’d finally let John William slip into the past. Most friendships end with a whimper, not a bang, and I considered letting ours end that way, but this, as it turned out, was a fantasy with no force behind it. There was this loyalty I felt, however strange.

That December, Jamie bought a Crock-Pot, but after a while we decided there was no way to cook anything good in it. We also got a sourdough starter going and were dutiful about keeping it alive. Jamie bought a ’63 Datsun with rusted fender wells, because she got tired of taking the bus. The stakebed’s brakes needed an infusion of cash. I noticed that my right hip hurt when I ran and started taking laps in the intramural-building pool instead. My chain saw had a starter-rope problem: it retracted cruelly, and its coiled tension stung my hand. My lower back hurt, and I quit cutting firewood. Then, at winter break, Jamie went to Pocatello, and, mostly out of guilt, I drove the stakebed to the trailer on the Hoh. There was snow on the ground there. The wind was rattling the bare branches of the trees, and the moon’s cold glow lay against the river. John William came out in a watchman’s cap. We stood by the truck only long enough to acknowledge how good things looked, and then we went in and sat in the flimsy lawn chairs, by the heat from the woodstove. There was an elk antler on the cable drum, and a book called
Reading Animal Tracks.
John William said that his work on the cave had been suspended by weather, and that the South Fork Hoh Trail lay under snow. He sat with his cap low on his forehead while we ate tomato soup. He also tended his fire, poking at the flames and adjusting the damper. He said that he went twice a week to Forks for groceries, and that he had permission to gather scrap wood at a mill—he cut mill ends to stove length with a bow saw there, and hauled them in the trunk of his Impala. I asked if his father ever visited. He said that the weekend after Thanksgiving he’d gone with Rand to the Hoh Visitor Center, which was closed, and hiked the Hall of Mosses Trail in the cold, Rand with his hands in the pockets of his Burberry and a pair of binoculars slung from his neck that bounced against him as he walked. “When I was your age,” Rand had intoned, “I was in the Seabees.” John William said, “I know.” They’d sat in the parking lot with the car idling and the heater on, and Rand had asked, “So what are your goals?”