The Other (6 page)

A rain close to snow, sleety, pebblelike, fell unremittingly one full night and day. We holed up and took turns reading
Desolation Angels,
and poring over a manual John William carried in his pack called
Outdoor Survival
—really a pamphlet, with diagrams of fishhooks improvised from thorns, clever snares, snow goggles crafted from strips of wood in which slits had been cut, the northern sky at night, etc.; these rough drawings were coupled with commentary on survival and with the divulging of lore. Being hungry hurt, but if you didn’t move around too much you could take it. We sat around, tent-bound and morose. It was during this torpor that Pete openly rebelled—“JB,” he said, “say more about gnosticism. You haven’t bored us for a while.”

“Okay,” John William answered. “You have a piece missing, Pete. According to the Gnostics. Something’s not right, but you don’t notice.”

“Right,” Pete said.

They squabbled until it got old, and then—tent silence. Our languishing and reading were hypnotic but boring—comparatively warm, dulled by hunger, I heard the call of hibernation, though it was also necessary to take turns gathering firewood, keeping enough on hand at all times so that some was always drying by the flames. In our womb of nylon, we cut cedar shavings with Swiss Army knives, fluffy firestarter we slept with so as to warm and dry it overnight—all this so we could heat our boots beneath the tarp lean-to we’d raised and boil what we were throwing in our pot, from watercress to the hedgehog mushrooms Pete said were edible (he was right).

Dire as things were the next day—us with the runs, wet beneath our clothes, and hunting grubs and night crawlers as we stumbled through the forest—we could always count on being resilient, favorably dumb, and braced by the optimism of teen-age hubris. We traveled north—and were turned aside from our zero compass heading daily by cliffs—on the hunch that the southmost road in Canada was closer than the northmost road in the United States, and one night we heard wolves, since this was before wolves ceased to haunt that region—a howling more like the slow, simultaneous closing of rusty screen doors than anything else, and from so far off we couldn’t be sure it was wolves until the wind died down enough to halt the stirring trees and our fire stopped hissing. Even then we didn’t know what it was for sure, but what else could it be, because what else sounds like that? At 2 a.m.? In the “North Cascades Primitive Area”? All sound in the woods is disorienting and confusing, but this sound was clear enough, eventually, to be chilling. Tent flap open, ears pricked, I thought that distant howling through, and it was a very short stretch from my own mean hunger to the perpetual, rapacious drive of wolves—but in the end we never saw any, though we did once get downwind of a black bear who, busy with an ant nest, treed itself at our approach. All three of us yearned to eat this bear, but none of us knew how to slay it. It must have discerned our shortcomings in this department, because when we dropped our packs and knelt to eat ants it scrabbled down, and we left, fecklessly.

On our fourteenth day, in light rain, we re-emerged with no fanfare south of Hope, British Columbia. You can imagine our reaction to the four drivers who ignored our thumbs; for the fifth, we stood mid-road like highwaymen and explained ourselves. Though there was sympathy in that car despite our rankness, we were nevertheless dumped at the first service station, where we sat on a concrete apron beside the gas pumps slamming cheese and chocolate milk, and feeling grateful to the cashier who took pity on us by accepting American coins against her boss’s dictum (we were eating before her till opened, that was a big part of it) but not without a handkerchief across her nostrils. After a journey like ours, people in the “real” world seem misguided and innocent of reality, and this was true not only of the travelers I saw pumping liters of fossil fuel but of everyone around me for a week or more afterward; and even well after a week, there was a residue of this lonely and acute perception of the organized social world as a pathetic illusion, and moments of re-embracing that perception in much of its original intensity (this happened to me while watching diners through the window of a restaurant one night in the University District, where I’d gone to meet cousins at a tavern that didn’t card). Yet, when my blisters had healed, and I’d eaten myself, once more, into arrogance, I happily recovered my old manner of being, though not without adding what I thought was a new layer of wisdom, and not without talking about those woods so much they palled at the same rate at which words about them formed in my mouth. I mangled and then annihilated our whole passage through the North Cascades by engaging in braggadocio about it for hammer-swinging Countrymans, and my sensation of loss was immediate and visceral and left me wistful for what I’d had before. When I mentioned this to John William a month after our deliverance, he said he knew what I was talking about because he’d tainted our journey in something of the same way by writing about it at school. Then he asked me if I wanted to go on another expedition, under similar circumstances, immediately after graduating, this time without a map or matches, relying instead on memorizing our path and making use of a flint and steel. I said yes. Pete Jenkins declined.

John William and I celebrated our release from high school by dropping, each, a tab of acid. Things went well, for me at least, as we wandered on foot through downtown Seattle, with cars passing us or coming toward us in the early-film-era style of moving objects in a stereopticon, and with every citizen on the sidewalks emotionally transparent. I had a mental battle with an alley cat—an eye-to-eye contest of wills I won with my third eye—and stopped a bus with a spread hand. All sound approached slowly and in increments, then left the same way. I knew who was dangerous and who wasn’t, effortlessly. However it was—and not to make too much of the experience of psychedelia—at some point John William’s sobbing registered with me as something not to be absorbed any longer. I’d watched his tears, even gathered a drop from his cheek on a scrap of paper so as to examine its stain; nevertheless, his crying had seemed not only distant but, however unhappy, required. With every wail, more grief passed out of him, permanently expunged, I felt—in fact, for me this was tangible, and his escaping sorrow had a color, a darkly burnished orange, that I perceived as an emanation. I saw his sadness as a bloodletting, and I was happy for my friend. But then things changed. The working of lysergic acid in the brain can produce dramatic shifts, and I came into an awareness of John William’s nightmare. A shroud descended, and the cast of things altered. I found myself beneath the glass roof of the iron pergola in Pioneer Square, with my back against a stanchion, looking north toward the Seattle First National Bank Building at Fourth and Madison—Seattle’s first skyscraper, and at that point its only one—and it terrified me, this dark monolith. All night, John William had been mumbling something under his tears, and now I finally homed in on his mantra as he curled on the cobblestones a few yards away from me with his hands clutching his face, as if in so doing he could hide from the truth of things—“No escape from the unhappiness machine…No escape from the unhappiness machine…No escape from the unhappiness machine…No escape from the unhappiness machine…” I started chanting that, too.

2

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ARLIER THIS SUMMER
, for the first time in eleven years, I hiked in the valley of the South Fork Hoh, where John William and I went without a compass or matches two days after our acid trip, and where John William spent seven years living alone. The trail passes under Sitka spruces, some more than five hundred years old, and under bigleaf maples hung with club moss. You would have to say that, given the presence of these maples, this isn’t quite your classic rain forest but a variation, with the maples thriving amid cobbles and rockslides and in the glacial till of the river bottom. Rain on the South Fork Hoh is common, but on my recent walk there was no sign of rain—instead, it was warm, and a little dusty where the silt had baked in the sun on the north bank. Still, rain remains this region’s most obvious feature in any season but summer. Notable, too, is the silence here, broken infrequently by the winter wren’s trill—reminiscent of a hysterically played flute—at other times by the ventriloquy of ravens. Then there’s the din of the river, fed by snow in the Valhallas and glaciers on Mount Olympus. In June, the South Fork Hoh runs gray and milky. It’s in places slow enough to suggest tranquillity, but elsewhere it’s extreme in its energy and character. So this is a hike of disparate feeling, unfolding under a dense forest canopy broken by glades of arcadian maples. It’s also a hike through lonely country, four and a half hours by car from Seattle, infrequently visited not only for this reason but because the main fork, a few miles to the north, has a better road and a visitors’ center near its bank. More, the main-fork trail takes climbers to Mount Olympus, whereas the South Fork Trail just leads to deeper gloom and, eventually, into a canyon. Sometimes anglers will try the South Fork’s upper stretches; even more rarely, a party of climbers will pass through on its way to the Valhallas, though I should point out that the first ascents of those peaks were mostly made in 1978, and none earlier than 1966, which should give you some idea of their remoteness. When John William and I first went there, in ’74, wandering into Valkyrie Creek Basin and making camp on Valhalla Ridge, the pinnacles of Bragi, Mimir, Vili, Sleipnir, and Vidar North and South had not yet been climbed, and this wasn’t because of their difficulties but because few climbers had gotten to them. They might have been busy with more accessible mountains, or maybe they hadn’t noticed this part of the map yet, southeast of the town of Forks.

This June, I walked alone on the South Fork Hoh Trail, three days after the end of the school year, one day after the graduation ceremony held, because of foreboding skies, in our remodeled gym, where students hooted as I strode to the podium in order to recite, into all that space, underneath a raised basketball hoop, “The Road Not Taken.” I have an annual date with Frost at this ceremony, and in the past have read the poem’s well-known final lines with embarrassed misgivings: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” Will the narrator’s apparent self-regard accrue to me? Will the convocation, seeing Frost’s narrator as superior, see me as superior by association? This year, after I cleared my throat, a student yelled, “C’s all filthy!,” meaning “Mr. Countryman’s rich,” and after everyone twittered, I delivered the Frost. The following day—the first of vacation—I got up early, filled my thermos with coffee, made a sandwich, and drove away before first light, and, frankly, despite the things I like about my work, felt glad I was free to walk along the South Fork Hoh instead of teach. It’s an easy journey in its lower reaches; in three miles a hiker gains five hundred feet, and after that, where the trail fades to moss, it’s a matter of meandering across soft green flats or treading on gravel bars near the current. I found myself preferring moss to gravel, even though there’s less gloom beside the water, because recently I’ve developed a Morton’s neuroma where the third and fourth toes on my right foot meet, and this makes me wince if I walk too many hours on unforgiving surfaces like river stones. Pain gives me reason to stop more often than I once did. I take off my boots. I eat a little something, or shut my eyes for a few minutes. Sometimes I lie in the fetal position and try, unsuccessfully, to sleep in the forest. It was in this posture, in June, that I heard a trilling winter wren and, later, a raven. The raven’s call was like water dripping loudly—like large drops of water striking a pool. It seemed to have nothing to do with nature; instead, it sounded like a plumbing problem. I wouldn’t have thought it was made by a bird at all except that on other occasions I’d watched ravens make this noise, though even with such clear verification it’s a note that still seems improbable and dreamlike. As does the past, sometimes.

John William and I, finished with high school, came at the South Fork Hoh from its headwaters, entering the woods at Boulder Creek Campground, and traversing the Bailey Range over four cloudless days, finally departing from published routes beneath Mount Olympus, where at close to eight thousand feet you can smell salt water on the wind. From there we found our way to the South Fork Hoh—which we didn’t know was the South Fork Hoh, because we didn’t have a map or compass, by intention—or, rather, to where it gathers in a moraine of icy water and wind-blasted scree, and then, walking in the river itself while the current wrapped around our legs, and using a climbing rope in watery belays, we came down from the high country in a canyon. Between rock walls, the falling water was so loud we couldn’t speak to each other. Trees grew from clefts in the cliffs or lay askew in the current. It seemed to me our purpose was to drown. Climbing down vertical walls in a river was something you had to be young to try, a form of lunacy, and yet my friend’s face was animated by happiness. Water dripped from his well-made chin. He’d come all this way committing landmarks to memory, so that we might, if necessary, reverse our course, and there was something in this epic mental effort, I saw, that appealed to him as an adjunct to danger.

Finally, things calmed. At midday, we sat by a pool under high slopes, taking the brief sunlight there and tossing stones competitively. We built a rock cairn, too, on a flat boulder in midstream. We were buzzed by a kingfisher, which we saw as a good omen, that the canyon might soon open into more passable country, which it did in the afternoon. Through the long twilight we walked along a tributary into deeper forest. The cedars here looked especially hoary because of their bare withes, which hung like deadwood. Later, we needed a drying fire and tried John William’s flint, steel, and char cloth, and though we did eventually produce sparks and smoke, in the end we used up the last of his char cloth without conjuring flames. It’s difficult, making fire this way. It’s an effort that makes you appreciate the achievement in a match. But it was warm in the June woods, and we slept on moss that night, with our boots and socks drying in our sleeping bags. The next morning, our tributary became dispersed and transient, and we left it in favor of keeping ramparts on our right. I remember sitting in dense woods, playing chess with John William on the type of miniature board air travelers used before the advent of laptops, my friend lying back on one elbow and crossing his ankles like a country squire at leisure, but shirtless and in baggy wool pants. Hair in his eyes, he made his moves with an anticlimactic nudge, then scratched his mosquito bites, teeth set in an impatient overbite, while I contemplated. As I recall, we played to a stalemate. It’s hard to understand why we wanted to spend so many days in the back country with little food, no fire, no map, and no compass, but maybe it was partly for that interlude of chess, for the disparity between chess and where we found ourselves. John William and I played a match of attrition while reveling in our isolation and eating the last of our raisins. Finally, we were only pushing lonely kings and pawns around the board, and the space between two moves became, for both of us, a nap. I felt languid after so much time in the high country and after banging against the boulders in the river, and to loll there in the warm breeze of the forest, my limbs at rest, was a luxury. I slept deeply, rare for me in daylight. When I woke, John William was reading
Outdoor Survival
—the manual he’d brought for our North Cascades debacle, too—with his head propped on his pack. He wanted to look for yew wood now, as appropriate material for a fire drill. Fire, he said, was “the key to everything.” I didn’t ask what he meant—what “everything” included—and after a while we pushed ahead into more gradual terrain, where the trees were widely spaced and so uniform around that the girth of each rose like the shadow of the next. On exposed stones, we crossed a stream; beyond that the land flattened. Through the branches overhead, a rock wall rose higher than we could see, disappearing into the canopy. This was a country of easy walking: no thrashing through swales of devil’s club and slide alder. We stopped to make camp in the early evening, and I sat on a log, wrapped in my sleeping bag, while John William tried again to conjure fire. He had a yew-wood drill and a cedar fire board now. He would drill for a while, then alter something—push tinder around, carve a fresh notch—or scrutinize the diagram in
Outdoor Survival.
I helped a little by prodding at the tinder; once, I put my cheek to the ground in order to blow softly on an ember, which went out. At that moment, I thought I was responsible for our failure. Maybe if someone else had done the blowing. But still we persisted, taking turns with the drill, which tired our shoulders. Yet our most energetic attempts produced no more smoke than a blown-out candle. The friction of the yew turned the cedar to black powder, warm but never combustible.