The Other (27 page)

I
N MY FIRST YEAR
of teaching, I began making it my ritual to read, annually, the National Book Award winners in poetry and fiction. I also began bringing these books to class when I’d finished them, a “Death Mask of Shakespeare” bookplate in each, hopeful that students might borrow and return them if I left the books conspicuously displayed. My first year at this, I set two hardbacks in the chalk tray, wrote on the blackboard
READ THESE BOOKS
, and drew an arrow from those words to each title. They disappeared, and, despite the Death Mask of Shakespeare, I never saw them again. After that, I changed tactics and started buying used paperbacks, so many that Jamie had to get me, for my birthday, more bookplates, and these titles I kept in a conspicuous bookcase on the east wall of Room 104. Some came back, some didn’t, but either way I had an excuse for used-book-store browsing. If I went to the right shops and bought the right books, I could keep to my budget of $300 a year and buy about a hundred titles.

Nineteen-eighty: William Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice
in fiction and Philip Levine’s
Ashes
in poetry won National Book Awards, but, looking at the list, I couldn’t help noticing that the winner in Religion/Inspiration was Elaine Pagels’
The Gnostic Gospels
. I bought John William all three, but it was the Pagels, of course, that excited him. It was like I’d brought him the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Rosetta Stone. He dropped everything else and read it while I was there, and so I read something, too, and this was a pleasant interlude, I thought, like a kind of Sabbath, except that every once in a while John William would mar the peace by blurting out a sentence from Pagels, like “The creator caused his Mother to grieve by creating inferior beings, so she left him alone and withdrew into the upper regions of the heavens,” or “The world originated when Wisdom, the Mother of all beings, brought it forth out of her own suffering.” I’d nod at him and say, “That’s great,” or “Wow,” and then return to my own pages, but he didn’t get my message and started paraphrasing instead of quoting, which was lengthier and therefore worse. The next day, which we spent setting traps meant to catch small rodents, hauling wood into camp, and filling canteens, we were able to talk about other things by about the dinner hour, but when we were in our sleeping bags later that night, and all conversation had ceased, and I, for one, was moving toward sleep, John William, as if it was a bedtime prayer, broke the silence with “And Jesus said, ‘Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over all things.’”

“Great memorizing.”

“Shut up, Countryman.”

I turned toward him and said, “What if I don’t want to rule over all things? What if I don’t want to be troubled and then astonished? Why would I want to rule in the first place? What if I just want to sleep?”

John William said, “You’re already asleep.”

“That’s so deep,” I said, “O Your Royal Profoundness Swami Laurelhurst.”

“You’re sleepwalking through your life.”

“The problem with living in a cave is that you risk turning into a guru, and then no one likes you anymore.”

“The problem with living in hamburger world is that you risk turning into an idiot,” John William answered. “Didn’t you say you want to write books? You can’t do it with a cheeseburger in your hand.”

I said, “I disagree. The only way to do it is with a cheeseburger in your hand.”

“How many have you written?”

“I’d have a book by now if I wasn’t always bringing you toilet paper.”

“I never asked you to bring me toilet paper.”

“I bring it anyway.”

“Why is that?” John William said. “Why is it you’re always bringing me toilet paper instead of writing the Great American Novel?”

“You tiresome ingrate.”

“‘Tiresome ingrate,’” said John William. “You’ve got a dainty vocabulary now. You’re ready for a cocktail party with ‘tiresome,’ Countryman. Your ‘tiresome’ is a nice touch.
Touché.
”

“All hail Lord Barry.”

I could hear John William scratching at his ringworm, or at whatever the problem was, in his scalp and behind his ears. “This is driving me nuts,” he announced.

“Use that stuff I brought.”

“I’m out.”

“I’ll get you more.”

To put it another way, I was like Purun Bhagat’s villagers with their corn, rice, red pepper, fish, bannocks, ginger, and honey. The Zen master could slap me across the face, and instead of leaving the monastery behind I’d fetch his rice with a terrible eagerness.

O
VER THE YEARS
, things changed. Parts of the trail were washed out by the river, and there was so much tree-fall every spring, when the water was too high for me to walk on the gravel bars, that the trip in became a bushwhack. I often scratched myself getting through with my expedition pack. Once, while struggling in a slash-filled ravine, I scared up a herd of elk, who crashed away so thunderously they scared me in return, because at first I thought they were an avalanche bearing down at just the moment when the rain forest had me throttled. On that same trip, I ran into three climbers with ten-day packs who were headed for the Valhallas. They were openly curious about a solo hiker with a load bigger than any of theirs but no rope or crampons, and I had to tell them that my plan was to waltz up Mount Tom and Hoh Peak, and from there to dabble with the possibility of penetrating northward to the Hoh’s main fork. In other words, I styled myself an inveterate bushwhacker as a means to explain my dearth of climbing equipment, and then sat around with this trio trading esoterica on the territory so as to seem legitimate. I don’t know if they were impressed, but I felt confident they were thrown off the scent of what was in fact a supply run. I was bringing food, soap, towels, socks, underwear, candles, and a host of cassettes from the Great Lectures Company with professors holding forth on particle physics, Victorian Britain, great battles of the ancient world, etc., so I made it a point not to open my pack while we sat by the river, these climbers and I, examining a map. John William, I should say, had by now a sizable cassette collection and an ample library, but he’d incinerated the
Penthouse
s and
Playboy
s I’d brought, because—he said—he didn’t want them “taking up space in my head.” I chided him for this. I described Rebecca De Mornay in
Risky Business
and Maud Adams in
Octopussy.
“Countryman,” he said, “poontang’s the bait in Jehovah’s trap.”

One spring when I showed up in his camp, my friend was smoking strips of elk meat in a miasma of smoke and blue-bottle flies. He looked skinny, dirty, scabbed, bruised, and scratched, and he had blistered lips, cold sores, and an infected eye. There was the smell in the air of singed flesh, and a peculiar odor I later learned was elk brains, with which John William planned to tan the hide. Bones, antlers, hooves, teeth, haunches of bloody meat, a bladder, some sinews—the pile of parts beside him was explicit. My friend was processing a five-hundred-pound mammal, which, when you think about it, is no small trick. By the butcher’s art, what was once whole is split, but not without a lot of gore, stench, and, if you’ve never seen an animal parted out before, news about anatomy. I sat upwind of the animal in question while John William’s foray as an elk smoker went poorly. He’d built a rack out of lashed branches, hung the meat from it by cedar cords, and set it downwind of his fire, and now, while keeping green wood on a cool blaze, was frustrated by his lack of temperature control. The fire would get so hot the meat would cook; then it would get so cool and smokeless the flies would descend. One rack of meat had already turned too black to eat. I tried some, but, as John William warned me, it tasted the way you would imagine cinders taste. We stayed up all night, modulating the fire and manipulating the distance and angle of the rack. As water left them, the strands of flesh shriveled and twisted. We made a few taste tests, but otherwise we stayed busy gathering green branches and, with prodding, aspiring toward a steady, cool smoke. I dried out at a slower rate than the meat did, and when I put my wrist to my nose the smell was of tinder. After thirty hours, John William was satisfied. We moved the meat onto a tautly strung line for air cooling, reloaded the rack, and smoked again, this time trying backstrap sliced thin as prosciutto and salted more heavily than the prior batch. Things went better, but it was still necessary to be constant at the fire, and to sleep in alternating snatches.

John William had found this elk, he said, in the woods to the north, in a dark hemlock forest, down on its flank and with two puncture wounds in its neck, but still warm. After milling beside it for forty-five minutes with his ice ax in his hand, he felt confident that its killer—it had to be a cougar—had chosen deference.

Satisfied, and making guesses and a lot of mistakes, he’d quartered the elk. He’d rolled up its antlers, teeth, bladder, hooves, and sinews in its hide. What he carried out first was a forequarter raggedly split off along the backbone and cut between the third and fourth ribs. When he came back, an hour later, toward dusk, to make a second run, a hindquarter was gone, and the liver and heart. John William hung the other hindquarter out of reach on a rope he’d brought, and tied up the hide as best he could, but when he came back the next morning, the hide had been nudged about twenty yards north of where he’d left it, turned over, and pawed at. His hung hindquarter was intact, but the other palatable remains were gone along the route of an obvious dragline, and there was scat nearby, the smell of cat urine, and flies working the offal.

His elk jerky, meant to last the winter, didn’t last until July. Nor did his “pemmican,” which was just a lot of pulverized elk flesh mixed with rendered elk fat and some yellow raisins we dried in the sun and tried to crush with a stone pestle. It went bad even faster than the jerky. John William thought he might have burned the fat, or not used enough of it; however it was, his “pemmican”—which looked like wax and sawdust—tasted rancid by June. As for the hide, I have to give John William credit. It turned out to be at least a modest success. He went at it the way he’d gone at building his cave. If his
Guide to Wilderness Living
advised him to remove the hair and epidermis with overlapping strokes a quarter-inch wide, he did that without cheating, and so did I, taking my turns. We fleshed, soaked, grained, and membraned; we stretched the hide, threw it in the hot tub and weighted it there with rocks, dragged it out and wrung it with twists, pulled it like taffy, bounced a stone on it as though it was a trampoline, beat it with a stick, rolled it over a rope between trees, and worked it over the base of a pick handle. We mixed the elk brains with water, and I ended up, later, at home, needing an antibiotic, because I didn’t wear gloves working brain mash into the hide. When I came back two weeks later, John William had made some inept-looking moccasins. They were so bad you could see his toes poking out of them. I brought him some glover’s needles and thick nylon thread, and he made himself an ill-fitting shirt. His tailoring was laughable. The shirt caught him at the armpits and puckered at mid-back. Some of its decorative fringes were wrongly placed and quickly burned to scorched nubs in his fire. To me, he looked like someone in a frontierish straitjacket, but he insisted on wearing it. It was at about this time that I began to realize how sad it was to see him. To pull into camp with my load of M&M’s, Top Ramen, Rye Krisps, Crest, and Evereadys, and find him yet again a little more devolved, a little more like one of those hominids I’d read about in Introduction to Physical Anthropology, was increasingly distressing. With his head coarsely sheared, his foot-long beard, his buckskin shirt, and his rudimentary moccasins, he was so flagrantly absurd, so filthy, so post-apocalyptic, and at the same time so evocative of the early-nineteenth-century American West as portrayed in a bad museum diorama, that anyone with the poor luck to come across him could not be blamed for assuming he’d gone comically mad, or maybe dangerously mad, or, if seeing him distantly, through trees, say in mist—say while crouching fearfully behind a log—that he had to be a figment or a flashback. But he was real, and, as I say, sadly so to me, because he seemed diminished and lacking in his prior fine luster. The fell-runner posture and the Gatsby-esque teeth were things of the past. His gums were swollen. His shoulders were small. I would find him in his cave at midday, in his sleeping bag, doing nothing at all, just picking at his cuticles and calluses and hawking spit; or I would find him sprawled by the fire with his head on his arm; or sitting under a tree as if he thought he was the Buddha. He argued now that there was a lot to be said for “conserving body fat,” as he put it, and for “the art of doing nothing,” but from my point of view he was just depressed. Which, I thought, reflected poorly on his mission. It hadn’t led to happiness.

That winter of ’84, I saw that in the empty spaces of his books he was making small drawings. If there was an available end or front page, he used it, or if a chapter started halfway down the page, he drew in the upper half, or if a poem ended with its final verse on an opposing page he filled the white space below it. His paint, or ink, was wood ash mixed with watered-down spruce pitch, and with this he could get shades of gray or black—though I noticed that his drawings were always of one color—and his brush was a raven’s wing bone tipped with elk hair bound to it with nylon thread. In my sleeping bag, with my headlamp on, I leafed systematically through his library. In none of his drawings was there anything like a direct representation of an object in the world, but, on the other hand, they weren’t abstract. The dots, dashes, lines, and daubs converged to imply, say, mountains in mist, or trees, or cliffs, or moving water. There were no human forms, and no symmetry or dynamism, just monochromatic still-lifes by suggestion, with the white space always put to work, and the paint applied supplely, like calligraphy ink. I thought this development, John William as artist, was at odds with how I knew him, but what would be the point of saying so? Even more unexpected was coming across this, written on the end page of
Rabbit Is Rich,
right after Updike’s illustrious bio: