Jubal Jim stops and sniffs a yellowing fragment. In this Pacific Northwest, through centuries, bone becomes soil but stone and ivory and teeth remain. This is a small tooth, certainly human, now cleaned by rain and yellowed by time. Jubal Jim makes water against a tree, moves on. There is something troubled in his gait, like a dog with arthritis, or a dog confused, or a dog unsure.
Like men and elephants, Jubal Jim is a creature of habit. He follows a familiar path. Where a tree has fallen he jumps over, stops to sniff among broken limbs or around torn roots. Insects are already about their business, burrowing, hiding, feeding in the rubble. Where the nests of mice or shrew are ripped away there remains a sense of departing warmth, though the nests, in fact, are cold.
Jubal Jim moves on, but with caution. At places along the path his belly lowers toward the ground. He crouches. Jubal Jim is brave, but tenuous in the face of change. He moves a bit more quickly as the roof of Sugar Bear’s shop appears among the trees. Windows in the shop are dark. Blown cedar tips cover the roof. Jubal Jim moves forward into Sugar Bear’s clearing, stops, momentarily confused.
The cliff, where in springtimes swallows were wont to dance, has disappeared. The cliff has become a slide, raw earth flowing beneath the sluicing force of rain. Where once stood a fairy-tale house, now lies a slope of mud and forest debris.
Crows fly above the clearing. A tree squirrel pokes its nose into the winter air, withdraws into its nest. The mud is nearly liquid, a field of mud above which not even a chimney shows.
Jubal Jim inches forward, sniffs, paws at the mud, and begins to dig. Liquid soil spatters behind him. The dug hole keeps closing as more mud flows in. Jubal Jim stops digging, Sniffs here, there, walks through mud. Gives voice.
The howl rises through the forest, deep, throaty, filled with sorrow, filled perhaps with anguish. The howl moves through trees toward the Canal. It is absorbed by forest and by the rush of water in a distant stream. Jubal Jim howls and howls.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
Flying Home
Just as we were gettin’ down to the part in the last chorus (playing on a barge in the Potomac) when everyone goes ‘rum-ba-da, dum-ba-da, rum—pow!’ I yelled to the bass player to ‘hit the water.’ And he got so excited that he jumped right in!
It was big and silver and the nose poked at air which in my memory is blue. People dashed back and forth beneath its wings with the bustle of third-rate bureaucrats over a fifth-rate rule. The thing was a Ford Tri-motor. It was the biggest plane I had then seen. At age nine the sight of that plane embarked me on a lifetime of social philosophy.
This was before the flowers came and before Baez began asking where they had gone. It was before anyone thought of throwing daisies at a cop. The USA in voluminous compassion had not yet bombed Hiroshima, lynched the Rosenbergs or lately engaged in war crimes. There were no sales taxes, televisions, shopping centers, subdivisions or freeways. We were told that the way to get an heir was to contact God. He dispatched a stork.
The Tri-motor was storklike. Squatted on the runway it stood high on widespread wheels. The tail slouched to the ground. When you boarded you walked uphill. The three propellers, one to a wing, one on the nose, rested gawkish as sticks cast at random. It was a toy designed for a monster poodle. Fetch, Fido, fetch; but the damned thing flew. In the air it was most beautiful.
“To your dad and to me a plane could be beautiful.” I say this to my friend as we discuss our differences. My friend was born after the Second World War.
“It was before the Theatre of the Absurd,” she says.
It sure was, although the world was drenched in the absurd. It was polluted with the absurd. My friend’s father, twelve years my senior, was about to go to war when I saw that plane. He would trail mules on the Burma Road. The battle jacket he wore in those days was given to his daughter. It hangs in our attic. Dry and cracking leather, a blaze of forgotten insignia.
The man who wore that jacket now runs a business in a large city and spends most of his time fighting encroachment by government minions or the large gulp and screw of corporations. He does not like the world’s business or its music or its plans. He works too hard and his voice is quiet on times when it might be loud. Both of his daughters are living with freaks. One with a writer, the other with a potter. At fifty-seven that sort of thing can be hard to deal with. He probably tries not to think about it.
At fifty-seven, and as a representative member of a generation that has been excoriated as nazi, conservative, business jock and all-around bad guy by half the population now alive, it may also be that he sometimes wishes his kids had more understanding. Is an act of justice due? Is it wanted? If justice were done would it hurt? Maybe. He expresses few opinions on amnesty for others, expresses no opinions on amnesty for himself.
I write of a silver Ford Tri-motor and of a generation of revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are those who turn the established order upside down. I write of their success and of their failure. There has been time to ponder the history. Part of that history is my own, and, though the philosophy of history and society has produced plenty of foolishness, it is not a fool’s errand. This is especially true in a time when the xeroxed soul is the convention, and when the hero has been abandoned for the martyr because the society produces few heroes. It is true at a time when big chunks of the population are emotional survivors before age thirty.
In all my travels I saw very little real poverty, I mean the grinding terrifying poorness of the Thirties. That at least was real and tangible. No, it was a sickness, a kind of wasting disease. There were wishes but not wants. And underneath it all the building energy like gasses in a corpse.
The contrast between these revolutionaries and their children can only be as angular and gawky as a stork. The generation of which I write did not know shit from shinola about ‘lifestyles,’ ‘chairpersons’ or ‘creation’ by committees. Few turtlenecks infested their closets. They were sometimes hep, never hip, and when their big bands swung they told each other to get hot, not cool.
They caused a revolution and raised a bunch of kids who during the ’60s would engage in a reformation. Reformation has historically been purifying reform movement based not on radical ideas but on fundamentalism.
Time rolls, the generations pulse, pant, dream and make babies. My friend is twenty-eight, her father fifty seven. In twenty-five years she will be thought an old fogey and her old man and I will both be dead. We lived hard. Thank God you don’t have to take it with you.
He was born in 1920. That meant that he was too young to enjoy the fun. The cats were celebrating the invention of walls by climbing them in those days. They were the days of Fitzgerald and Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe. A world of red hot and enlightened boy scouts. Someday a professorial set of whiskers will flash on the similarity between Richard Nixon and Gatsby.
Eugene hemmed; hinted timidly at shagginess; confessed. They undid their buttons, smeared oily hands upon their bellies, and waited through rapturous days for the golden fleece.
“Hair makes a man of you,” said Harry.