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?”
“I have one goal,” John William told him, “and that’s to be reincarnated as an elk, Rand.”
We sat in his trailer laughing about that. Then John William got up and came back with his chessboard. I’d been practicing and wanted badly to beat him. There was a chess club on campus, and I’d been playing against fiends and aficionados in the Husky Union Building and taking my lumps. At a used-book store near campus I’d picked up, for 35 cents, Rudolf Spielmann’s The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, with its examples of sham sacrifices and real sacrifices from legendary European matches, and I thought I could defeat John William by pretending to lose while gaining good board position. He stoked up the fire and put the board on the cable drum. The hot light from the stove spilled over the squares and illuminated the black and white bodies of the chess pieces so that they looked like they would melt. John William tugged his beard. He took off his cap. Out came his king’s pawn. It took only this to make me waver and to recollect an observation of Spielmann’s: “The timid player will take to real sacrifices only with difficulty, principally because the risk involved makes him uneasy.” The gambit of sacrifice suddenly seemed in error. As a result, I got caught between two strategies and, on the defensive, exerted myself over the course of a long battle to produce a draw. There was no pleasure in that. Four or five times, I was so deliberate about my next move that John William picked up Reading Animal Tracks to pass the time. This was arrogant, or seemed arrogant. He said, “Hard to get counterplay in your restricted position,” and “Good move—keeps tension in the middle of the board.” Of course, these comments irked and incited me. But what could I do? In silence I pressed. We played a second game to a draw, and then a third. John William went out for more firewood, and when he came back told me he was interested, lately, in flint knapping—the art of making stone tools. He was emphatic that learning to knap was hard and showed me where he’d driven a pressure flake into his thumb while attempting to shape obsidian. He also showed me some flake scars he’d made on a chunk of flint, but there really wasn’t much to see.
In the morning, we took the Impala to the coast. We walked north, toward Hoh Head, in a heavy rain, and sat under trees on a bluff above the ocean. There were gulls in the sand, and a seal partly eaten by turkey vultures. I was a little surprised when John William, wielding a lockback knife, cut a strip of meat from this dark carcass in the sand and chewed it tentatively; he said it tasted like beef jerky and wanted me to try it, but I passed. We built a shelter out of driftwood and sat in it in order to avoid the wind, which by noon had the force of a gale. I laid my head against a square of washed-up Styrofoam. John William, in his watchman’s cap, fingerless woolen gloves, and a tattered yellow poncho, stood barefoot in the surf with his arms raised, yelling. I felt impatient. I wondered why we were suffering these particular elements. Later, we took shelter again in the relative protection of the shore trees, where John William, leaning against bark, stripped off his gloves so as to inspect his calluses once more. “I’m majoring in English,” I told him.
“Why?”
“I like it.”
John William said, “What’s the point?”
“What’s the point of anything?”
John William: “What’s the point of reading a lot of dead Brits?”
We drank water and ate pilot crackers. We compared the scars on our palms, mine crescent-shaped, his longer. I suggested leaving, and after a while we walked down the beach to the mouth of the Hoh. “I remember this place from when I was a kid,” John William said. “My mother got interested in native art. She had these Hoh elders from here recorded on tape, but then she flipped.”
This April, at about the time that I was prominently in the newspapers, a Hoh elder spoke at our school. He wore thick glasses and a flannel shirt and stood on the auditorium stage with the American flag on his left and the Washington State flag on his right. He showed slides. He told the students that the Hoh used to eat what was on the beach—barnacles, anemones, sea cucumbers, seagull eggs, smelt, and so on—and what they caught in pitfalls and snares. He said that in the beginning the Hoh walked on their hands, but then were turned right side up by Changer, the better to dip smelt. He said it was interesting that no owls lived on the South Fork of the Calawah, and that some Russians stranded on the coast in 1808 were made into slaves by other tribes, but not by the Hoh. Eventually, almost the whole tribe died of smallpox, brought by the drifting people.
In my classroom that afternoon, after hearing from the elder, my students and I, with the lights off and the shades drawn, watched The Great Gatsby on a television wheeled in on a cart. I sat in the back of the room, looking over the tops of their heads, taking in this oft-repeated scene in my life—Room 104, with its blackboard and posters of Tolstoy and Eudora Welty, its flag in the corner, and its model of the Globe Theatre on a table against a wall—but, frankly, I had seen that movie too many times, it had staled for me, and I wanted to shut it off and ask my students what they thought about that term, “the drifting people.”
A YEAR PASSED, and, despite myself, I went on helping my friend with his cave. Then, in March of ’77, John William showed up in Seattle. He called one Friday around midnight, and I explained how to get to our apartment. Then I sat on the couch, not doing anything, just looking out at the dark reach of the cemetery, and when he knocked I threw the door open wide and said, “Hey—you shaved your beard.”
“Well observed, Countryman.”
“Are you getting a job or something?”
John William, ignoring this, said, “The lonely writer in his gloomy cellar.”
“Not quite,” Jamie called from our bed and, with the blanket wrapped around her, shook hands with John William—the long arm emerging the way an arm emerges from a toga.
We put records on, including All Things Must Pass—the Cindy Houghton Christmas gift John William had repulsed—and Jamie lambasted Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who’d prompted George Harrison to take up meditation, saying that the Maharishi had propositioned Mia Farrow, which, Jamie felt, undercut him spiritually. John William said that, for him, Krishna and Jehovah were the same, a point Jamie wouldn’t grant. She said that the dualism of the Hindus wasn’t really dualism; John William replied that the origin of darkness was in God himself; Jamie shook her head and said, “That’s out of left field” John William plunged next into something he called “the Valentinian Speculation”—with what I once heard a school psychologist call, in reference to a talkative student we were discussing, “socially inappropriate enthusiasm”—anyway, this is why we were awake during the wee hours.
Eventually, I gave John William a coat to sleep under. Around ten, I woke up because I heard a mousetrap leap in the kitchen. On the floor beside me was a collection of Henry James’s stories; I was supposed to be writing a paper on James, but hadn’t started. So I read for a while. I scribbled in my journal. We ate bowls of cereal at noon, puffed rice with bananas, Jamie referring to this as “Apple Scruffs,” though it included no apples. Then she turned up the heat, put new records on the turntable, and started arguing with John William again.
In the afternoon, I made a lentil soup. I baked soda brea
d with raisins in it, which my grandmother Cavanaugh called Spotted Dog, and we ate it with orange marmalade and butter. Our basement smelled like onions. Everybody read for a while—I read James; Jamie, Willa Cather; and John William, my copy of Climber’s Guide to the Olympic Mountains, which had missing pages. He and I couldn’t help ourselves and reminisced, while Jamie was deciphering Death Comes for the Archbishop, about crossing Mount Olympus from the Queets Basin. John William read aloud the descriptive text—“This route, across the northeast side of Mount Olympus, crosses three major glaciers and requires mountaineering skill, roped travel, and crevasse-rescue knowledge and equipment”—after which Jamie put down her book and asked us why we were laughing so hard. “We should be dead,” John William answered.
He went to the shelf and, finding Ovid there, recommended “Baucis and Philemon” to Jamie before selecting, surprisingly, a haiku collection I’d bought at a moving sale, Kobayashi Issa’s A Few Flies and I. He sat down with it on the couch and turned its water-stained pages. After a while he said, “Here’s a good one:
“Awakened by a horse’s fart,