"I'm gonna have a great spring right here in this shack."
"Durn right, first thing we do this weekend is invite some nice new girls I know, Psyche and Polly Whitmore, though wait a minute, hmm. I can't invite both of them they both love me and'll be jealous. Anyway we'll have big parties every weekend, starting downstairs at Sean's and ending up here. And I'm not workin tomorrow so we'll cut some firewood for Sean. That's all he wants you to do. Though, if you wanta work on that job of ours in Sausalito next week, you can make ten bucks a day."
"Fine… that'll buy a lotta pork and beans and wine."
Japhy pulled out a fine brush drawing of a mountain. "Here's your mountain that'll loom over you, Hozomeen. I drew it myself two summers ago from Crater Peak. In nineteen-fifty-two I first went into that Skagit country, hitched from Frisco to Seattle and then in, with a beard just started and a bare shaved head-"
"Bare shaved head! Why?"
"To be like a bhikku, you know what it says in the sutras."
"But what did people think about you hitchhiking around with a bare shaved head?"
"They thought I was crazy, but everybody that gave me a ride I'd spin ' em the Dharmy, boy, and leave 'em enlightened."
"I shoulda done a bit of that myself hitchin out here just now… I gotta tell you about my arroyo in the desert mountains."
"Wait a minute, so they put me on Crater Mountain lookout but the snow was so deep in the high country that year I worked trail for a month first in Granite Creek gorge, you'll see all those places, and then with a string of mules we made it the final seven miles of winding Tibetan rocktrail above timber line over snowfields to the final jagged pinnacles, and then climbed the cliffs in a snowstorm and I opened my cabin and cooked my first dinner while the wind howled and the ice grew on two walls in the wind. Boy, wait'll you get up there. That year my friend Jack Joseph was on Desolation, where you'll be."
"What a name, Desolation, oo, wow, ugh, wait…"
"He was the first lookout to go up, I got him on my radio first off and he welcomed me to the community of lookouts. Later I contacted other mountains, see they give you a two-way radio, it's almost a ritual all the lookouts chat and talk about bears they've seen or sometimes ask instructions for how to bake muffins on a woodstove and so on, and there we all were in a high world talking on a net of wireless across hundreds of miles of wilderness. It's a primitive area, where you're going boy. From my cabin I could see the lamps of Desolation after dark, Jack Joseph reading his geology books and in the day we flashed by mirror to align our firefinder transits, accurate to the compass."
"Gee, how'll I ever learn all that, I'm just a simple poet bum."
"Oh you'll learn, the magnetic pole, the pole star and the northern lights. Every night Jack Joseph and I talked: one day he got a swarm of ladybugs on the lookout that covered the roof and filled up his water cistern, another day he went for a walk along the ridge and stepped right on a sleeping bear."
"Oho, I thought /this/ place was wild."
"This is nothin… and when the lightning storm came by, closer and closer, he called to finally say he was going off the air because the storm was too close to leave his radio on, he disappeared from sound and then sight as the black clouds swept over and the lightning danced on his hill. But as the summer passed Desolation got dry and flowery and Blakey lambs and he wandered the cliffs and I was on Crater Mountain in my jockstrap and boots hunting out ptarmigan nests out of curiosity, climbing and pooking about, gettin bit by bees… Desolation's way up there, Ray, six thousand feet or so up looking into Canada and the Chelan highlands, the wilds of the Pickett range, and mountains like Challenger, Terror, Fury, Despair and the name of your own ridge is Starvation Ridge and the upcountry of the Boston Peak and Buckner Peak range to the south thousands of miles of mountains, deer, bear, conies, hawks, trout, chipmunks. It'll be great for you Ray."
"I look forward to it okay. I bet no bee bites me." Then he took out his books and read awhile, and I read too, both of us with separate oil lamps banked low, a quiet evening at home as the foggy wind roared in the trees outside and across the valley a mournful mule heehawed in one of the most tremendously heartbroken cries I've ever heard. "When that mule weeps like that," says Japhy, "I feel like praying for all sentient beings."
Then for a while he meditated motionless in the full lotus position on his mat and then said "Well, time for bed." But now I wanted to tell him all the things I'd discovered that winter meditating in the woods. "Ah, it's just a lot of words," he said, sadly, surprising me. "I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions." Japhy had changed since the year before, too. He no longer had his goatee, which had removed the funny merry little look of his face but left him looking gaunt and rocky faced. Also he'd cut his hair in a close crew cut and looked Germanic and stern and above all sad. There seemed to be some kind of I70 disappointment in his face now, and certainly in his soul, he wouldn't listen to my eager explanations that everything was all right forever and forever and forever. Suddenly he said "I'm gonna get married, soon, I think, I'm gettin tired of battin around like this."
"But I thought you'd discovered the Zen ideal of poverty and freedom."
"Aw maybe I'm gettin tired of all that. After I come back from the monastery in Japan I'll probably have my fill of it anyhow. Maybe I'll be rich and work and make a lot of money and live in a big house." But a minute later: "And who wants to enslave himself to a lot of all that, though? I dunno, Smith, I'm just depressed and everything you're saying just depresses me further. My sister's back in town you know."
"Who's that?"
"That's Rhoda, my sister, I grew up with her in the woods in Oregon.
She's gonna marry this rich jerk from Chicago, a real square. My father's having trouble with his sister, too, my Aunt Noss. She's an old bitch from way back."
"You shouldn't have cut off your goatee, you used to look like a happy little sage."
"Well I ain't happy little sage no mo' and I'm tired." He was exhausted from a long hard day's work. We decided to go to sleep and forget it. In fact we were a bit sad and sore at each other. During the day I had discovered a spot by a wild rosebush in the yard where I planned to lay out my sleeping bag. I'd covered it a foot deep with fresh pulled grass.
Now, with my flashlight and my bottle of cold water from the sink tap, I went out there and rolled into a beautiful night's rest under the sighing trees, meditating awhile first. I couldn't meditate indoors any more like Japhy had just done, after all that winter in the woods of night I had to hear the little sounds of animals and birds and feel the cold sighing earth under me before I could rightly get to feel a kinship with all living things as being empty and awake and saved already. I prayed for Japhy: it looked like he was changing for the worse. At dawn a little fain pattered on my sleeping bag and I put my poncho over me instead of under me, cursing, and slept on. At seven in the morning the sun was out and the butterflies were in the roses by my head and a hummingbird did a jet dive right down at me, whistling, and darted away happily. But I was mistaken about Japhy changing. It was one of the greatest mornings in our lives. There he was standing in the doorway of the shack with a big frying pan in his hand banging on it and chanting "Buddham saranam gocchami… Dhammam saranam gocchami…
Sangham saranam gocchami" and yelling "Come on, boy, your pancakes are ready! Come and get it! Bang bang bang" and the orange sun was pouring in through the pines and everything was fine again, in fact Japhy had contemplated that night and decided I was right about hewing to the good old Dharma.