Sometimes I ache for the arid landscapes in Eastern Oregon, or for a spacious rim rock vista on the plains of
In the stunning stillness, on a road I can imagine, a car would kick up dust. My boots hardly raise a flurry. Magpies and meadowlarks, perched on barbed wire, sing under an endless sky. There isn't any water in the intermittent creek bed that twists along the road and under a fence, but you can see the eroded banks along the hillside and swirling eddies of gravel where spring torrents flowed. Even in the heat, it isn't difficult to pick up the pace.
What am I looking for out here? A rattlesnake I couldn't face down as a boy? Am I trying to remember illusions that went down with the frothing spring runoff? Something left of me under the hardened and crusted clay breaking up in the ditch? A chronic ache in my chest that drives me here has something to do with the problems we outlast rather than solve. Twenty years, or thirty, have gone by while I have been trying to begin. I've found ways to make a living without making a life. Summits that seemed unattainable have sometimes proved climbable. But even when I've succeeded in spite of myself, fanatical illusions have helped me lose my way. When I've made money, I've cast it upon the water.
In another sun-blistered land, in another time, Jacob could wrestle with God until in the morning light, he was promised land and progeny. If I were in a position to negotiate, with a half-nelson around God's sweaty neck, so to speak, I think I would settle for the one thing I can't seem to find--work with some sense of purpose. It would help if I could live on spacious light-bending land like this.
When I was a kid in
Had I comprehended the first few chapters of Genesis when I began to read them, I might have saved myself considerable trouble. I had just enough talent as a youth to think I could choose the life I would live. The sensible counsel I got seemed blind to the bucking vitality and muscle I couldn't wait to engage. Teachers advised me to aim high--medical school or the equivalent. But I couldn't help asking why anybody would want to spend their working years in a hospital? I became expert at wasting time. If somebody could have shown me the future in engineering, my aptitude for science might have been used. But the problem was more basic. I hadn't yet realized how well the world is described by the image of an angel with a flaming sword standing in the gate of
In the flush of youthful overconfidence I couldn't anticipate the arbitrary nature of much that was going to be required of me. From the story of Cain and Abel, I should have deduced that one frequently encounters strictures most uncongenial to the imaginable possibilities. There are human responsibilities to which one must be attend, even before it is clear what is going to be significant. Some people are more willing than others to accept the seemingly arbitrary criteria concerning a vocation that will support a decent life. The mere existence of a moral factor is disputed. When Cain saw that he was expected to conform to the metaphysics Abel had correctly ascertained, he took his brother for a walk in the field and killed him. Treachery of that sort has always seemed incomprehensible. Experience has taught me to expect trouble.
But you begin to get the idea that it wasn't other people who were the main source of my problems. Misunderstandings of the Bible early in my development took me down a road to screwy ideas about religion. The trip can be very intriguing. It led to some of my evasions in school. If the highest aspiration anybody can pursue is knowing God, everything else seems a distraction. Mathematics may not be of any eternal significance. Nor career decisions. The Four Horsemen are ravaging the earth, and the trumpet blast seems imminent in the night sky. What else matters?
The eschatological visions of Isaiah are glorious, and John's Apocalypse--or Daniel's--has put the fear of God in minds less susceptible to literary imagery than mine. It's just that using the "last things" as an avoidance strategy in the present obscures other vital issues. A kid who is college educable should start pursuing some profession, not spend his evenings contemplating the intricacies of timetables to Armageddon. Remember the worthless servant who buried his money in the ground to wait for the Master's return!
It was the Vietnam War, not good sense that got me into college. Given the choice between the war and more aimless study, I enrolled at the
I didn't want to be a nuisance, but when there was philosophizing of the sort to which freshmen are prone, I offered opinions. This was often late at night. Some of the guys were half loaded. It was no time to discuss your convictions, even if everybody was friendlier then. But I put in my two cents worth, and word got around. Later, some guy would walk in wrapped in a bath towel while Gary and I were studying. Even though I didn't have the leather-bound, gilded-page variety Bible, if I happened to be reading a page with two columns on it and numbered verses, the horseplay was likely to begin.
"How you doing, guys?" Jake Michelson might query, his hair still wet from the shower. "Oh, excuse me!" He'd say, "I didn't know you were READING ABOUT THE LORD!" loud enough for people to hear him on the other side of Hayward Stadium. Then maybe he would flash a centerfold under my nose, from one of the girlie magazines that were always around. He should have known I wasn't interested in that kind of casual sex; I had already studied every page that interested me in those magazines.
The ribbing I was getting was rarely spiteful. The rest of the guys just didn't want me being a wet blanket on the festivities. I was determined, though. I felt obliged to talk longer than their interest lasted. I got a couple of them into a study group, invited others to church. My church was doctrinally sound. The minister had degrees from intellectually respectable institutions. Enough of the people were committed to Christian ideals that it was what a church is supposed to be--hospitable, caring--but there was a bit of a cultural difference between the Bible-Belt folks in the church where I ended up and the college crowd. I had to get used to an atmosphere very different from the Lutheran Churches in which I grew up--a long way from
I admit it bothered me not being a regular guy. I held out pretty well most of the time, but when I lapsed it was horrendous. I got drunk, and thrown in jail. Couldn't handle my liquor! But I found out how charming I could be if I got rid of my inhibitions with a couple of sixteen ounce cans of Colt 45. The girl I mauled seemed to be enjoying my company, until I fell asleep on top of her. Take that any way you wish. It amounts to the same thing. I had betrayed
I prayed for forgiveness. Over the years I've had similar opportunities. I plod on. It's getting hot out here, and I don't know where I'm going.
The dorm counselor that year had a conscience that bothered him about being in school with a student deferment while his friends were in
The skirmishes I fought were of a spiritual nature. When I lost a battle, God picked me up off the ground, but what did he ask in return? I tried to be decent to other people. Some of them talked with me when things weren't going so well, and I was sympathetic. I offered what I had. Some accepted Jesus, but later deserted, as far as I could tell. This didn't deter me in thinking I should become a minister.
Two significant passions kept interrupting my resolve that first year. The girl I had left back home filled my thoughts as powerfully as the tide that floods against the current of the rivers on the
My second passion I pursued in the company of a few outdoor enthusiasts I met at the university. We were obsessed with wilderness. What I read of Beowulf was mostly out of a book taken from my backpack, around sunset on a ridge up in the high Cascades, or along the
It's a wonder how a Christian can quote Jesus verbatim on most any subject and still be a lost soul. Was the road I was following going anyplace? That's what we're trying to sort out here, brothers and sisters, for my benefit as much as anybody's. If we can get to the bottom of it, maybe the next twenty years won't have to be like the past.
The first three Gospel writers all include a passage in which Jesus lays out his severe conditions of discipleship. "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel, will find it." Want to be a hero? Here is a longstanding invitation. If you take this to heart when you are still young, don't be shocked at some of the things that happen to you. With this injunction in mind, when you find trouble, there is always the ready excuse that you took it on voluntarily. The worst part is realizing, later, how much of your righteous posturing was pointless.
While we have the specimen here on the table, the first thing we should dissect is a malignant tumor known in the jargon as bad faith. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he will direct thy paths." This familiar quotation can be reassuring. God is there to help you. Hang on when you are in doubt. Work to pay your way through school if you have to. Study like mad to get where you are going. But when this idea of God directing your steps gets turned into an excuse for not knowing where you are going... . Trying to interpret the conditions of self-denial and sacrifice with regard to vocation leads to many problems. Maybe only those who make a deal with the devil can get ahead in this world. Maybe... Or maybe I just didn't have the guts to find my way like anybody else. Maybe I was looking for the salvation that will come when Jesus rides out of heaven on a white horse, his thigh branded King of Kings and Lord of Lords. His call is to vigilance. You must always be ready, for the Master comes at an hour you do not expect. But watch out for the sword that issues from his mouth. It cuts both ways. You must also produce. Remember the servant who put his money in the ground, and waited.
I started telling you about my home-town sweetheart, Mary, and how I loved her. I was nineteen. What can you expect! My heart still burns when I remember her as she was then. A blond, of Norwegian descent, she smiled and laughed with the abandon of pillaging invaders overrunning classical
Strange that she should be a Catholic when both her mother and father were Norwegian. A half-breed Norwegian-Italian myself, I had relatives on Dad's side who were Catholic, but Mom won out in the end. My sister and I were reared as Lutherans. In my case, that wasn't the half of it. I searched for a long time to find a church that was right for me. Then, because this gorgeous girl was a Catholic and I was a Protestant, I was willing to torpedo a relationship that was sailing along under blue skies on a glass sea. How religion had polluted my soul!
At the
Only one course that second year reminded me of Mary. The summer between high school and college, she and I had driven to
I didn't do well in Shakespeare. Needless to say, my mind wandered. It wasn't that I didn't care about the plays. I understood Othello, the Platonic, ideal man who is undone by Iago's cunning and his own passion. I was only twenty years old, but I knew if I was going to stay in control, it was going to take more than philosophical--or theological--rigor.
In my second year, Mary was at the university as well. I saw her occasionally--at the post office, or on
Obviously, Mary wasn't the only attractive coed at the university. There were other possibilities... . But Mary, Mary! There may be other flowers in the garden, but how you've grown! She kissed even better with the braces off--and half of her clothes. We made up for lost time. Unfortunately, too many nights I walked home wondering how things had gotten so out of hand.
This was 1970. Repression was the only sin. Sexual liberation was in. We were like a couple of Puritans at a fraternity wine stomp. We should have taken time to get acquainted again, and the relationship might have flowered. There was no substantial reason we couldn't have gotten married. I felt like a moral cripple on the way home at night. I was strong as a horse, but couldn't even control my sex drive.
It wasn't sex that was the problem, really. We had an enemy, disguised beyond recognition, who thrived in the competitive environment of the university. Ambition was beginning to possess me. My demon was nobler than trying to get rich. It was greed for intellectual splendor, a passion of the mind, that made me blind to my beloved. Art and Philosophy--theology, for God's sake! Even when she told me I always went straight to her bookshelf every time I came over for a visit, I couldn't see the hazard for what it was. Wasn't she more interesting than her art history textbook with its bronze of Zeus?
The suspense lasted only until spring. She began to realize she had only my body, and she started accepting other invitations. Half the track team was interested in her. Try to run against that crowd! I had kept her waiting too long by the time I realized my work had turned us into strangers. The joy of being together was again a thing of the past. Just to spend an evening with her, I had to wait for weeks. Realizing what had happened, I was dead to my work, as well as to other advances. The enemy who had lured me into this trap now pulled the cord, and several hundred pounds seemed to fall on me.
It was what I deserved, I suppose. But why should using my mind turn into a menace? After all the years of apathy! And was our shared joy meant to drive us against a wall with desire, then kill us off slowly in the separate distractions we found? Our prayers and our fasting meant nothing? What do you think? If all this seems meaningless to you, I weep for you more than for the two of us.
After that, Shakespeare was impossible. I was good for nothing but psychology. Reduce a love affair to Freudian psychodynamics. Or to some analog of Skinner's Harvard-educated rats! I should have joined the army. But, of course, by then I had bought most of the rationalizations being sold in the streets. This war was American imperialism. Remember? Prop up the Thieu regime for the great economic advantage of the West. It was a more convincing argument before there were mass graves in
In spite of my unbelief, psychology courses were no problem. I was doing well. But a question I can never help but ask started getting in the way. To what does this lead? Well, a graduate program in psychology leads to research, or you go into counseling, institutional or private practice. Me? Counsel?
About this time I got a letter from a friend who had won a National Merit Scholarship and gone to Harvard. He was having the time of his life. God, how I ached! When he came home for the Christmas holidays, we went to a concert in
For my Harvard friend, Rubenstein was inspiring. I had to go back and face another six months of psychology. It was a relief to go home for the summer and look for a job. My father didn't have to be a psychologist to read my mind. I needed a job, fast, to work out the bad blood. Dad had worked for the railroad since he was fourteen or fifteen. He had lied about his age to go to work for his father, an Italian immigrant, section foreman on the Great Northern Railroad. One of the officials Dad called to get me a job had known my grandfather in
In a matter of days I was a student brakeman between
That summer, another man for whom I have more respect than I have for some of the educated vultures I've known, continued to instruct me in the proverbs and parables of the Bible. Often enough, I do something stupid enough to get myself killed. Sure, your average is better than mine, but go on like that for a while, and you will start to realize you have no lease on life. I was willing to spend a lot of Wednesday evenings listening to this teacher, in a concrete-block church on
There were seldom more than twenty five people, including children, at those meetings. Brother Thompson would lead a few songs in his buzzing baritone. Hershel
The kind of instruction I received there often targeted the theme of obedience to God. My teacher, Ken, used to say--probably still does in the country church back in Oklahoma where he has more or less retired--that what God requires of us hasn't changed much over the various periods of history spanned by the Bible. The resolve shown by Caleb and Joshua may differ in the particulars from that of the apostles of Jesus, but the will to obey is much the same. My spirit was willing. At that time I still thought Jesus could show me the way, and I would determinedly walk in it. But I found out how much I lacked of the single-minded devotion shown by my seasoned instructor.
Ken did most of the teaching in this small congregation, but he also worked to support himself and his family. Having had enough of the politics of career work in the church, he was employed for many years as a retail clerk in a hardware store. By the time I knew him, he worked for a machinery company doing business with companies like Modoc Lumber and Weyerhaeuser. He taught from the Bible without knowledge of Hebrew or Greek. His method was analyzing the spiritual dilemmas the Bible helps resolve, not picking the meat from a literary carcass to feed other scholars. Some of the loggers and railroaders and their wives in that congregation were better students than I was. They learned sooner not to run after life. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Dallas and Vera had a couple of boys who probably wished they were out playing baseball rather than in church. One of them did eventually play a little pro-ball, I've heard. I think both of the boys work on the railroad in
One morning at a filling station, I heard that one of the boys Hooper had tried to reach had died of a drug overdose. This boy, Carroll, was tough. He was a man in his twenties when he died. Hooper had adopted him for a while along with one of Carroll's hard-drinking, brawling brothers. Hoop was another railroad man. He was able to talk to these renegade Indians. He must have told Carroll to try to get acquainted with me. He didn't speak to many people, so I was astonished when he began speaking to me on
The high desert east of
Who are you, Jesus? What have you to do with the people who put up billboards with Romanesque typeface along the freeway? Or leave tracts on the edge of the sink in the men's room that quote the Bible and threaten hell fire? Above Stronghold, a railroad siding near the Oregon-California border, there is a cross that juts in stark indignity from a rocky hillcrest. I passed it trip after trip on the train to
The sound of my voice echoes from the rim rocks above my crooked path. A hawk flaps once and drifts on a thermal. It must be pushing a hundred degrees out here. Forty days in this might do me good. Who am I to criticize! Some of my friends were coming home crippled from
Young doctors looked up with me at Jim. Larry, an intern at the
His friend Hugh didn't answer. Cold, impatient, he swung his arms and flexed his manicured hands. We waited in the crooked fissure where a snowfield beneath us had melted away from the base of the rock face. Midmorning already, this was only the first pitch of the climb.
I kept noticing Hugh's white, physician's hands. They were scrubbed, dexterous. Mine were battered with scars and strawberries from weekends of climbing abrasive granite. Of course, Jim and I were the fanatics; we didn't have anything else. Just then, these guys with medical careers must have thought Jim was, at least, slightly insane. He had assaulted the first pitch of our climb in a way that made you think he should confine his athletic feats to a stadium someplace.
A pole-vaulter at the
Inner space at my end of the rope harbored its own reflection of existence, here so jammed at the horizons. Jim's vital spectacle had made an impression. Larry and Hugh had their reasons for being here. However we conceived this impulse to climb, there was exhilaration in the naked energy of rock and glacial ice. But climbing a north face in September was neglecting something basic. We had plenty of time to realize it as we stood waiting in this bone-cold notch. Jim had to take the proper precautions. But it was peevishly cold.
In general, the weather that autumn in the Tetons had been splendorous. The previous day, bush-whacking up the steep ravine south of Nez Perce Spire and the
We continued over moss-covered granite, and our packs strapping weight bore down on us. As we neared the top of the falls we felt a sense of accomplishment. We slouched over the uppermost slabs and collapsed exhausted in the grass. A languid stream slithered around boulders then gorged the grizzly throat of the rapids that had thundered in our ears all afternoon.
Upstream,
From this vista we could see the entire length of the ravine in which we had hiked all day. It bottomed out to a flat expanse under the eastern haze--
Anticipating the stress of climbing, we had joked about the French explorers who named these peaks the Big Tits. After a trek across the continent, horny fur trappers projected libido on these beautiful mountains. It must have been a lonely journey.
Jim had tied himself to a flake of stone on a steeply sloping ledge. He squatted on his heels like a savage, and hauled up rope. I felt it tighten around my waist. When he yelled, I shouldered my pack to follow his lead marked on the rock by a trail of iron. It took a moment to loosen up. The rope was reassuring--at this stage all I could have done, even if I had fallen backwards, was skin my knuckles. I reached Jim's first piton and untied a loop of nylon, then hammered the pin back and forth until I could pull it with my fingers from the crack where he had driven it.
"Up rope." Jim took up six feet of slack.
The first charge of energy on a climb is strong enough to lift you out of the physical apathy in which most people live their whole lives. Under the influence of adrenaline, I glided upward effortlessly. I was where I wanted to be. In the rapture of it, I was going up and watching myself going up at the same time. Grasping the rock made heat flow into my fingertips.
A kind of counter-tension can be used to keep you on the rock. Trying to find the angles, I hesitated. Jim yelled, "Keep moving! Don't hang on the wall."
Being too careful will just wear you out. But I didn't spend all my time climbing; I had to think. I strained to get a boot up--a difficult move. Jim had nerve to lead this.
Balancing on a wet sloping foothold, I bang out another pin. Hot chips of stone fly at my face.
Climbing again. Higher! A careful balance move puts me on top of a sharp-edged pillar near Jim's perch.
"Good," he says. "Hang on, I'll give you the iron."
I looked down the hundred feet of rock we'd just climbed, and beyond, down the steep striated snowfield sweeping out toward
I yelled down, "Are you going up the ridge?"
"It's easy, class four," Jim added.
"Maybe we'll see you on top," Larry hollered back. A surgeon in training, he would understandably not want to risk freezing his hands.
To me, Jim says, "Can't blame them. This is no place for standing around."
"Too bad, though," I answer, "I'd hoped they could get in one good rock climb, so they'd have stories to swap over cadavers."
"We'll be the cadavers," Jim says, "if we don't get moving."
Larry and Hugh traverse west across the snowfield, miniature men with packs and ice axes. Their boots crunch as they pick their way in the shadow of our steep face.
"They'll get a workout on the ridge," Jim says. "Anyway, they climb for the same reason they run up stairs in the hospital--for the heart."
I suppose I was doing it for the heart, too, though in a different sense.
"Ten thirty already," I say as Jim puts the sling of iron over my head. I shift it under my arm.
"Not a good start," he answers.
"You ready for me to go?"
"Climb away."
Up! Iron jangles across my chest. The earth seems to sway far behind me, beyond the dangling rope.
On awkward ledges with loose shingles of stone, I veer west, creeping toward our objective, a broad fault opening hugely in the variegated granite. Once there we can climb about ten rope lengths up the most formidable section of the wall.
When the ledges peter out, and high-angle rock rears enormously before me, I take the best line up I can find. There are cracks to place pitons when I need them. I'm glad to get my feet off the trashy skree that collects on the ledges. Looking up into the sun glare, I can't plan everything, but the movements that take me up seem mostly under control. "Spiderman! On Christ the solid rock... . Mmmmmm. Stop talking to yourself." It's scary. Even the rock has the cold sweats. Beads of ice infest the handholds.
The rope begins to drag through the karabiners in the protection I've placed. I yell, "How much rope?"
"Thirty feet."
Who started this waterfall in my ears? Two more moves! Up. Up. I opt to straddle an uncomfortable but solid bulge, and anchor in.
"Off belay."
Jim's answer is faint, lost in the gusts of wind that dust the face. He leaves his secure ledge. I watch as he climbs and try to keep the slack out of the rope.
"Rockfall! Shiiit."
"Who the hell's dumping their garbage!"
A chunk the size of a bucket smashes down end over end, then the impact of one bounce explodes it into a barrage of odd-shaped projectiles that whine past and off into space.
"One of those would soften you up, man. That's meat tenderizer!"
By two in the afternoon we had established a position high in the fault. It opened sometimes, when you looked down, to nothing but blue sky. Struggling between the walls, I had scraped my back, and sweat burned in the scratches. In spite of a warming flood of air, we had reached that point on a climb where exertion and exposure make you reconsider everything. We had committed ourselves--it would now be easier to continue than go back down--to grunting up more than a thousand feet of granite, nothing but rope and iron to intermittently pin us to the wall. The rock felt solid, but I was an audacious interloper here. The shift of one block of the peak's enormous weight would crush me, a tremor shrug me off to be dashed to pieces. A pebble falling from the heights would air out my brain.
To control one's reaction to objective dangers with such monstrous force requires continuous effort. Jim goes out on the edge of the fault to get around blocks the size of gravestones jammed inside. There, he can see how out of hand things have gotten and mutters, "Good place for sky diving." He joked around like that. The worse it got, the funnier he was.
Up.
Up. He feels around with his free hand. His breathing hovers like the changeable wind currents circulating over the face.
Slamming a piton until its head sizzles, he works violently to get some protection between himself and the awful drop. The dust of his struggle falls in my eyes. His tense fingers fumble with a nylon hero loop. Then he clips the rope to it with a karabiner, and he's safe for his next few moves.
In the sun now, he goes up the corner of the fault until he can mount the highest chunk lodged in the opening. Thirty feet higher, he disappears. I sit in the shade playing out rope.
He takes it up and yells. I follow his line of rope.
When I can see him again, I say, "We're going to have to sprint. This crack would be plenty cold at midnight."
"A fucking refrigerator!" He answers.
I make one last lunge toward where he's waiting with the iron. He hangs it around my neck and says, "Keep on going."
I climb, and the wind drives tiny droplets of mist up the face. They seem to flow right through me. My loose nylon slings stand up flapping as I search the rock above.
Synthetic colors catch the eye instantly up here. At first I think the patch of orange I see is a climber. We could be overtaking another party, but I haven't heard any voices. Climbing signals seem to carry well to everybody on the mountain except the person on the other end of your rope.
The patch of color didn't move. When I reached it, I found an orange nylon rucksack caught right where I wanted to sit to belay Jim up. I drove in a piton and hung the pack and myself on it. While Jim climbed, I examined the contents--a few slings, an empty water bottle, an old can of tuna, and a down vest. The weather had faded the nylon; the pack had apparently been there many months.
When Jim got up, he turned over the spoils for himself. On the inside of one flap on the pack he found the owner's name--Rupert Warner.
"Rupe shouldn't have left this behind," Jim said. "I hope we don't find him next, if he's been up here as long as his gear."
We leap-froged up, extending the rope between us repeatedly. The fault widened to a windy couloir with occasional patches of snow. Sometimes I could scramble free for an entire rope length and save time. We weren't cold anymore. Even sitting, belaying, I scarcely had time to rest before Jim would come up beneath me, and I would have to start up again. We shouted signals back and forth, going as fast as we could, but our late start and the autumn shortening of days were against us. This north face was getting cold, even while the sun still shone on the peaks across the valley.
When Jim comes up under one of my belay points, he is alarmed that I have climbed the last pitch without placing any pitons. "That was too hard to do without protection," he complains. You want to rip us off the mountain!"
"Win a few, lose a few," I answer. "I was just as scared following you down there." I point. Maybe he's not convinced. I give him the iron, and he's off. Why argue about it?
It seems this gully will never end. It bends above us toward the darkening sky. When we get over one bulge of stone, there is another. The sun glows momentarily on the tops of distant peaks, and then is gone.
Twilight overtook us as we engineered our assault on the first false summit. Several of these formidable blocks could have been the top. Finally, one of them cut away on the sunset side, and we scrambled up a climactic spire--the top.
New peaks were visible to the southwest, huge jagged icebergs in a black sea. The valleys were flooded with darkness. In the windless expanse of the sky, the clouds had retreated to the horizons or settled as mist on mountain lakes that reflected a last radiance.
We continued to wear the rope as we descended the upper west ridge. I wanted to rest, savor the elation of our ascent, and gaze on the mammoth earth in convulsions beneath us, but we had to negotiate our descent before it was completely dark. We ran down the blade-edge ridge, silent depths falling away on both sides.
A prominent geological formation that struck me, even in my haste, was a monolithic granite wall meandering along the crests of a range of mountains. It was like the
I hadn't time to stop and look. I had to keep lunging down the ridge. Some of it got too steep to scramble down forward, and we had to climb down, turning our backs again to the sky. Far below us was our objective, a broad sloping field of talus. To get off the ridge before everything went black was the thing. Then we could grope our way back to camp.
The rope went slack, and I came to the end of it. Jim had untied it for a faster descent. He apparently was even less interested than I was in getting caught up here for the night. I coiled the rope.
It was nearly flashlight time already, dark enough that I almost walked past Jim where he sat on a huge block at the top of the talus field. Startled, I looked up at his figure against the dim sky.
"We're going to have to cross the glacier on the low end to avoid the icefalls," he said. "We'd never find our way through the broken stuff in the dark." He'd been studying the glacier for a while, from the convulsed ice on the high end to the cornice that hung over the lingering sheen on
"I don't want to get close to that lip," I said.
Jim looked at the acres of boulders ahead of us and said, "You might not care after a mile of this graveyard."
We felt our way and crawled through the talus in the dark. My shins and knees were taking a beating. It was like trying to hike in a herd of buffalo. If you moved too fast, they stampeded. I couldn't see Jim, only the spot of light ahead of my flashlight. When the batteries went dead, the stars blinked at me from above the towering silhouettes of the peaks.
Finally, out of nowhere, Jim whopped, "Aiee, a springboard into the lake!" We had reached the glacier. "Start sliding, and make a high dive when you fly off the edge. You can swim back to camp."
"I don't even like the thought of it. How close to the edge are we anyway?"
"You'll know if you find it."
"Want to wait till morning? We could walk this stretch in half an hour in the daylight."
"Who wants to shiver out here all night!"
We rope up again and take it nice and easy. Granular snow crunches under our boots. The broad surface under us glows eerily, confusing my eyes.
"I wish I had an ice ax," Jim says.
"I wish I were an Oscar-Meyer wiener. Let's just get this over with."
"Don't rush me."
We carry a few loops of rope to delay the shock if one of us slips. I could probably stop him, if he started to slide, or he could stop me. Probably. Twenty minutes or so of stepping and slipping got us across the snow. Then it was off with the rope, and back into the rocks.
It's a wonder these high lakes aren't filled up by the landslides that tumble down from the peaks. Our seemingly negligible progress is exhausting. Jim waits for me, and we sit down panting, trying to get enthusiastic about the rest of the ordeal.
"Another mile?" He asks cynically.
"You can see the campfire," I say. "They're trying to make it easier."
"All I see is black rock and ice."
"Don't get hostile."
We drain our last water jug. Jim says, "At least we got off the mountain. If we poop out now, the night won't be nearly so cold."
"If we had been slower?"
"We'd be up there getting numb as tourists at the South Pole."
"When we were still below eight thousand feet at noon, we should have rappelled off and gone back to camp for a pot of soup."
"They serve three meals a day at those dude-ranches in
"We played it loose this time and came out all right, but I think we should at least consider there being a more conservative way to climb."
Another hour or so bungling, half the time on our hands and knees in the dark, put us on the meadow above the falls. The water rumbled out there someplace. I hoped Larry and Hugh and the rest of them had left something to eat. I was as beat up as a football player after the Super Bowl.
They heard us coming, stumbling through the brush, Jim poking about with a stick he had picked up to feel his way like a blind man. Jack Barrar who was then a freshman climber came out to meet us. We could see his lanky body against the red glow. He has since outdone all of us in the mountains.
"You could at least have picked a moonlit night," he said. He handed me a plastic bottle, and I gulped the cold water.
Jim said, "Sorry to keep you up waiting, Mom."
Jack chortled.
I give Jim the jug as we clump toward the fire. He washes dirt and sweat from around his eyes. Larry and Hugh are standing by the fire. A pot of food steams over the coals.
"Dark out there?" Larry asks.
"Why don't you two take up spelunking!" Hugh adds.
"Just pass the botch, Doctor," I say. "What is it tonight?--cirrhosis of liver?"
They grin at me in the red light, both of them in down parkas. Larry is wearing a knit skiing hat. In only a wool shirt, I'm still sweating. I throw the coiled rope over a boulder beside one of our tents. The aluminum pan I fill with rice and beans quickly transfers heat and singes my fingertips. Jim and I stare at one another through the flames.
Those were the grunt and sweat days. It's been years since I've seen either Larry or Jim. Jim and I used to talk as if we might really get to the bottom of things, as if it mattered what a couple of guys in their twenties thought about anything. But why did we have to think? Why not just live? There were other mountains to climb and willing young women who would have gone with us to
"I wake up in the morning and all I see is insanity. People are running around doing meaningless things. And they tell you drugs are a retreat into fantasy. These are people who spend four or five hours every night in front of the blue haze of a television set, people who work for years at jobs they don't like so they can buy everything they see advertised."
Jim was no junkie. He had had enough of drugs in a matter of months. He was just one of those people who want to know why people take a world with such possibilities and turn it into a two-bit carnival.
It doesn't take many days in the cold mountain air to convince you the sky is bluer, and your body more marvelous than most people ever imagine. After you have looked into the deep blue of that sky, how do you come down to measure out your days at traffic signals, to live with people who don't have the sense to turn off the raucous noise that passes for music on the radio, and where commodities bottled or packaged in cellophane are hyped mindlessly everywhere? How do you go back to school and study when all the spiritual questions are taboo? Jim eventually got a degree in philosophy. After a few years of Wittgenstein and Warnock he concluded the discipline was a pastime for tedious pedagogues in smoke-filled rooms.
Jim and I discussed religion. My last stop at night on the way home from the library was a
Jim was one of the few people I've known who have been interested in any of this. The guys in the dorm now seemed reminiscent of a Sunday-School caricature--I was the kid with his Bible who got pelted with mud by young scoffers outside the church. The guys who gave me a hard time turned out to be alright. Funniest thing was the time I said to Jake, "One of these days I'll make a Christian of you." He glowered, and when he had thought it over, he came back into the room and said, "I am a Christian!" Then he walked out in a huff. After that, we got along pretty well. A big strong ROTC fellow named Gene Brown who went to church with me could have squashed anybody in the dorm. Jim probed at me because he was interested. One day in June I baptized him in the
We searched around for a group of believers with whom he could grow in grace. You guessed it. Jesus was alright with Jim, but most of what was going on in church drove him straight up the wall. His mother was a Congregationalist, so under duress, when the draft board called him in to explain himself as a conscientious objector, he went to the Congregational Church. The organ music calmed him for the ordeal coming up during the week, but he must have slept through the rest of the service.
We went to a church that had a reputation in town--it was on fire, they said. A friendly place, it looked promising, lots of young people, not too conventional. After a couple of gospel hymns, a woman lifted up her hands and delivered a wild prophecy in an unknown tongue. Jim and I gaped at each other. The minister in charge was apparently used to this sort of thing. He was a youngish fellow who looked intelligent and cagey. He said, "All right, we're going to wait for the interpretation." That prophetess was probably as uncomfortable as the rest of us as we waited. Finally the minister improvised the best he could. It was--as I think he intended--something less than satisfying--not quite the demonstration of power as when the fire fell at Pentecost. People were going to think twice before anybody got carried away again.
Jim and I didn't give up on the place, but we continued to check around. At an Assembly of God revival one night, when the preacher was on a roll, and people were dropping in the aisles all around us, Jim was astonished when I stood up in the aisle to wait for the laying on of hands. The preacher came along salivating and shaking his hands like a madman who had just perpetrated some heinous crime. When he closed in on me, honestly, I gave it my best. "If this is the real thing, I'll be a complete fool. Fine, I'm willing." Apparently the preacher's hands didn't pack the wallop I'd expected, or I wasn't susceptible. Nothing happened. Jim didn't seem to mind my gullibility. Another fellow who had come along with us that evening said, after the commotion had abated, "I think the church needs something like that--but not like that!"
Jim found a group of Jesus freaks who had quite a ministry to drug addicts and other drop-outs on the streets of
This bothered me. If the Holy Spirit is the presence Jesus sent to comfort his followers in his absence, it seemed that the Comforter should be comforting--the Presence, present. At least one should know if she/he has it\him. It's hard for me to say. I can't remember a time when God didn't seem, well, present. I suppose if you have lived your whole life as if there is no God, and you start believing there is, it will be a soul-rending experience. Conversions are dynamic because the old programming is revolutionized at a very basic level.
But what about the miraculous demonstrations of power we read about in the gospels and in the book of Acts? And the considerable body of modern testimony along these lines? I've never seen the genuine article, but I have been places--oh, Lord--where there is a lot of leg pulling going on. You think I'm speaking metaphorically! The church is spoken of as the bride of Christ. In our time it has become a inexcusably frumpy housewife.
I went one evening to a church where a classics scholar from
The charismatics have a point. If Jesus saves people, body and soul, it seems there should still be miraculous healing of the sort evident in the gospel narratives. In spite of the whooping and hollering among miracle mongers and the wild ideas I encountered, I hung around with the "full gospel" crowd for quite a while. I read and heard amazing stories. I've met a lot of people who have had remissions of various sorts. One fellow told me about a boy who shot himself in the leg. His knee was a real mess the first time the doctor examined it. X-rays showed a knee joint that was shattered beyond repair. The evidence the next day--after the prayer meeting--was so dramatic that it was driving the doctor crazy. The boy's leg had been miraculously healed. Strangely enough, the man who told me about it was wondering why things never worked so well for him. He had been in the doctor's office and seen the boy on the table. He believed with all his heart that God still miraculously heals--sometimes.
I eventually found a way to speak an unintelligible tongue. The trouble with unknown tongues is that they are, well, unintelligible. But, going beyond the fringe like that can be an experience. I once glimpsed the sunlight of another shore. It gleamed on the stupendous columns of a city by the river of life. The vision didn't last. It's hard to bring anything back from the other side of that river. But, I haven't forgotten what I saw. That same gleaming light has sometimes flooded over a room full of people in prayer or praise. At times I have been ecstatically transported. What more can I ask? Well, I end up asking for the strength to live day by day. The raptures don't answer some of my troublesome practical questions. Right. After you have been on the mountain, coming down to the traffic and smog is a problem.
When I've had that kind of high-voltage electricity aflame in my body, why should I want to fool around with hypnosis and Hindu meditation techniques? Hard to say. I got interested in hypnosis after reading Freud. The theory of the subconscious mind gives you the idea there is cool water deep in the well that most of us have never tasted. A lot more was being written on this subject around the turn of the last century. The university library had quite a cache of books from the old school.
Perhaps the subconscious mind is nothing more than the inner logic of thoughts and behavior we try to compartmentalize, a consistency we wish to avoid. Poe's Imp of the Perverse is apropos: On the edge of a cliff, the harder you try not to fall over, the greater the compulsion to fall. Also relevant is the old expression, the Gods frown on the person who wants something too much. The inner logic is simply that trying extremely hard to do something drags along with it the idea that it must be very hard to do.
Whatever the mechanism involved, I was able to "auto-suggest" greater efficacy in my work. I remember finishing a paper for a social psychology class that seemed hopelessly out of control. After hypnosis, the materials I had researched seemed to organize themselves in my mind. I learned to speed-read with comprehension and recall--a difficult book in an evening--sometimes. My vision is about 20/400 without my glasses. Hypnosis cleared it up often enough to convince me something was happening. Then there is the record of surgery performed under hypnosis, babies delivered, and teeth filled or extracted. And extraordinary feats of memory have been possible.
All this is interesting, but more interesting is the possibility--if the subconscious mind is more than a theoretical construct--that there are ways to use it all the time. We're getting a long way from psychology as it is now practiced. A lecture on Transcendental Meditation interested me in the technique that was then being popularized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. With a little instruction, I could relax into a mental state not unlike that of my prayer state during those late nights at the church. Jim and I both became meditators. A new group of friends came with the process of getting our minds expanded.
Durham McCormick was small-framed Irish freshman with a mop of unkempt red hair. He wore it over the shoulders of his threadbare Herringbone sport coat. Though his family was wealthy, he shuffled around in shoes with holes in them. It seemed as though everything he owned had holes in it. His white knees showed through the frayed edges of the holes in his jeans.
During and immediately after meditation I may have been a little drifty. People have noticed that about me from time to time anyway, so I don't think TM affected my mind too drastically. I did find the technique calming. Repetition of the mantra put me in a deeper, more pleasant state than the repetitive ritual I had used to hypnotize myself.
A mantra is just a word. You might think of it as a sound. For me it had no meaning. Apparently the mantras used in TM are the names of Hindu deities--though we were told the technique had nothing to do with religion. Anyway, this word, when it is first presented by an initiator, is spoken with an exaggerated effort of the lips and jaw. The teacher then refines the pronunciation of the word-sound. First it is audibly repeated, and then you just think it. They say this gives the mantra a "slant." The idea is that the mantra "dives" into more subtle levels of the mind through repetition and refinement. The mantra can begin to "sound" almost musical as you practice TM, morning and evening. It should be effortless. A nice easy repetition is the right method. If you lose the mantra for a while, you simply come back to it when you are aware you've lost it. No big deal. No strained concentration. No ascetic mortification of the flesh. You just sit and "think" the mantra.
Why? What for? One might wonder! Lots of people begin TM, and it's such a bore, they quit as soon as they realize nothing psychedelic is going to happen. No magical powers of mind emerge. I found it very similar to the prayer state I have experienced ever since I began to pray alone in an undisturbed place. Strangely enough, I wasn't alone, I was among friends, when I experienced surging waves of bliss.
Mark Steidel was a music student from
So, we're sitting in her room with our eyes closed. A little sandalwood incense is burning in an ashtray on the table. The two of them might just as happily have ended our little group meditation and gotten rid of me, but they were being patient. It was a nice friendly atmosphere. Early evening. After thirty minutes of the mantra, I'm enjoying it more all the time. I start grinning like an idiot, then laughing out loud, big waves of bliss flooding up from--I'm told--my Kundalini. When it feels this good, why fight it? They were pretty astonished. I seemed such a reserved sort of guy, and no doubt I was full of all kinds of inhibitions--after all I go to church. This was like some kind of public orgasm. What can I say? After five minutes of bliss bombs, I became an enthusiastic devotee.
I remember trying to explain to Jim what TM was all about. He had been to the first lecture. He and another mountain-climbing friend were going to be initiated. Jern, the other climbing bum, said after they had taken the plunge, "This has to be the best 'con' ever--seventy five bucks, a hundred fifty for both my wife and me. For what? A word!" I told Jim I thought somehow this technique was taking me closer to the heart of whatever keeps me going. None of us really knew what was happening, but something was happening. Most of us commented that looking at our hands seemed strange, as if they belonged to somebody else, somehow detached from us. Weird.
Now, a lot of Christians are condemning TM. I can't say I ever experienced anything too bad under its influence. My senses were sharper, and I felt more alive. Mark quit smoking. Lots of people get off drugs when they start meditating. I met one fellow who cleaned up his life, got married and started a family. He had been a rock musician who--as he put it--previously groveled somewhere near the anus of the universe.
A Jamaican fellow I loved, Warren Chen Shui, was a friend of Jim's. About seven feet tall, he was a triple-jumper, on a track scholarship. He was dark and kindly. His nest of kinky black hair would have made a nice home for a family of robins.
Meditation was more than a relaxation aid for
In early December that year Mark, his girlfriend Debbie, Warren, and I loaded ourselves, our incense and changes of underwear rather loosely in my Chevrolet Corvair. We were headed for a three-day meditation retreat on the Olympic Peninsula. Jim was going as well, but he was riding with
Four people and their baggage in that car added up to about three hundred pounds more than the car was able to manage. It was all I could do to keep it on the road. Every gust of sleet, or a deeper-than-usual river on the road would send the car into the next lane. Mark started making puns--variations on a theme--while the rest of us groaned.
We crossed the
In the back seat Debbie was being a good sport. She knew the rest of us wouldn't be in favor of her lighting a cigarette. She was used to traveling in a little higher style than my Corvair--in a Porche or a Mercedes.
Sometime before midnight we arrived at the retreat center in
After several hours of meditation the next morning, the food tasted surprisingly good, much better than the usual church-camp fare. The meditation society had brought in a catering service that specialized in vegetarian foods and microbiotics. If I was becoming anemic from this kind of thing, I didn't notice. I had lost some weight.
What a time we had! Three hours of silence each morning broken up by periods of yoga asanas. Most of the time, only the sound of the rain or an occasional bird complaining about wet feet interrupted my mantra. Eventually the big bell down at the dining hall would ring out through the fog. We'd all trundle down to smile goofy smiles at one another and eat. Then it was back to our cells for four more hours. Once in a while I would have to make a trip across the wet grass to the toilet. I'd come back chilled and wrap up in a wool blanket to start "singing" my mantra again. It was cozy, really.
Evenings, we were a little more sociable. And they gave us more to eat. The digestion works efficiently at the pace we were moving. It was a very relaxed group. People talked, but there was little of the vying for center stage often found in groups. Mark played funky piano. A lot of the people I met at these retreats were busier in their day-to-day lives than you would expect. One counter-culturist woman I was sort of interested in said she thought this was nice for a weekend, but she was running a business in
In the middle of Sunday afternoon, my meditation was disturbed by what seemed like a lot of bumping around on the upper level of the dorm. I went up to ask the people up there to go easy on the yoga, we were trying to attain Cosmic Consciousness downstairs.
On the way home, we stopped at a logging-town supermarket. Jim had suggested on one of our climbing trips, "If you have to eat meat, find something that flies or swims." We piled out of the road-hazard we were traveling in, and I looked for something fishy or something fowl. I didn't have a can opener for tuna or shrimp, so I wandered over to the produce displays. A green pear I picked up seemed rather interesting. It was firm, a little blotchy. There was something striking about that pear. With a jolt, it hit me. I realized it was gleaming with the same golden light I had seen on the columns in my vision of the otherworldly city. Believe, or don't believe. I saw what I saw, and a charge of electricity surged through the nerves along the bone under my biceps.
I was not enthusiastic about going back to the grind. In
I meditated morning and evening for about a year and never felt that it was detrimental to my Christianity. Quite the contrary, everything, including going to church, was richer, more full of meaning and significance. Or maybe I was more attentive. Walking along the street on Sunday morning, I felt revitalized. The old-fangled hymns and the
After I had been meditating for a few months, I went home for a visit with my parents. I must have looked like a weirdo when I showed up at home with my curly beard. But our reunion had the same new depth and richness that I had noticed in other areas of my life. We sat around the dinner table with a sense of satisfaction. Mom had made a big trout that Dad had caught down on the
If I discussed meditation with my minister, I don't remember any issue being made of it. Stuart was an educated man. The whole idea of TM would have probably seemed silly to him. A kind, devoted man as well, the only time he ever scoffed at one of my stories, it was clearly justified. A friend, another super-saint, told me that at a charismatic Episcopal Church in
Stuart spent a lot of time with me, as he did with others he shepherded. I never had the feeling with him that there was a hidden agenda or that the church was serving his ambition. Maybe it was, but he was helpful to me at a critical time.
When I began to get the feeling I should stop meditating, it was just a matter of time priority. I was meditating during the time I had formerly spent in prayer. Eventually, meditation had to go, though I didn't want to give it up. I was kind of cocky about it, when I told Mark. I didn't say anything for a long time after I stopped meditating. Meditation was important to him. What I said wasn't as bad as the way I said it. It was like, look at me, I haven't meditated for months. I must have given him as much of a pain as the people who condemn TM like Puritans on a witch hunt.
Warren and Jim didn't mind that I was going to leave my soul in Jesus' care.
Another friend, a guy named Jerry, had begun the journey of a thousand miles with Jesus. We talked and studied the Bible together. I encouraged him to be baptized. A few years earlier, when Jerry's father had died, none of the family had had anything to do with the church. Jerry was distraught and sought help with the only spiritually inclined person who seemed able to help him--a hypnotist who believed in past-life regression. Memory corrects me. What the man actually said was, "I don't believe in it, I know it."
Jerry was maybe sixteen at the time. His father was a self-made man, an island. When the island went under, Jerry weathered the storm with the help of the doctrine of serial lives. Years later when he began talking to Christians, he became one of us. But he, too, had become a meditator along the way. He began to wonder if the two paths diverged at some critical choice.
I knew the fellow who was telling him meditation was demonic. He seemed alright, if a bit humorless. I'd often seen him waiting with his Bible in a coffee shop nearby. I guess he felt that if he was available, the Lord would send him somebody to witness to. I admit I've tried that kind of cold-turkey evangelism. Once in a while you meet somebody who will talk. You spend a lot of time bugging people who are on their way to work or who don't want to spend time in a harangue about religion. The hard-liner who was telling Jerry meditation was evil was a committed person. I have to give him credit for that. A year or so later, when I was about to take off for
In spite of pangs of conscience, I went to
The big diesels rumbled, three, dirty yellow SP&S thirty six hundreds on the point, as the trainmen say--six hundred horsepower per pair of flanged-steel wheels, rolling with over a hundred cars behind them down the long grade above Bend, Oregon. It was five A.M. We had just passed Lava, a siding named for the landscape outside--like the surface of the moon. Burnished steel rails stretched out ahead of us. To lay this track, the section workers must have blasted for years through the burnt, twisted-looking stuff outside. The lava spread out for miles toward snow covered summits, the Three Sisters,
It was a pristine July morning, but the heat and smoke from the engines gave a brownish tinge to the blue of the sky and the snow covered peaks. It was still cold enough that we needed the cab heaters. Their buzzing added to the din of the engines and made dust circulate in the air. Before daylight it had taken all my attention to keep from dozing. With the sunrise, I was alert. The rest of the crew had perked up too.
Pat Kilty, the engineer, was admonishing me on family planning. "You're making good money now, kid, you think, but wait till you have a bunch of parasites running around on your carpet! Look at me. I thought I'd paid long enough, but now I'm putting another daughter through college." He spit out the words between glances at the track ahead of us. Sitting there gripping the air-pressure handle, he looked a little crazy, sparse hair poking out from under his canvas engineer's cap, his face white and powdered looking. Almost ready to retire, he was still one of the hottest engineers on this line. "Physical Education!" He barked disgustedly over the roar. "Why the hell couldn't she have studied accounting? Spoiled her, I did. She didn't know the difference. The only physical education she needed was a good screwing."
"Ha!" The fireman yelped.
Pat's upper lip trembled a bit as if he was shocked himself by what he'd said. If he wanted to amend it, he couldn't seem to find the words.
Clumps of Junipers and sage brush growing in the flats on the fringe of
The inertia of the weight and length of train behind us pushed us into town. A freight train rolls without friction if the engineer knows what he's doing. Hundreds of thousands of pounds glide on steel, the slack between cars surging and ebbing. Engineer Kilty drew off twenty more pounds of air to stretch everything out. If he had miscalculated the slack would have come smashing, one car at a time, all the way from the caboose. That kind of force is bad news if a brakeman happens to be hanging on the ladder of a boxcar.
In the yard, tracks branched into infinity, straight and parallel on the cinder roadbed. The radio sputtered something unintelligible, and Kilty slowed us down to a nearly imperceptible roll. The rear-end brakeman and the conductor were getting off the caboose. They'd have to take a cab and meet us at the depot.
Car men were moving about on the ground. Called "car toads" by the trainmen, these gnome-like figures wore greasy coveralls and gloves up to their elbows. One of them carried a shovel.
A few of the tracks branched into the mammoth doors of the engine barns where other diesels idled heavily. Huge vents hung down from the high ceilings to fan out fumes. These diesels are never turned off while in service because the engine blocks contract too much in cooling.
I shoved the fireman's travel bag across the floor of the cab. It was heavy. "What are you smuggling in this thing?"
"It's glass," he answered. "Food supplements."
Mel Starr was a body builder. On the road his bag was full of bottles of vitamin pills and protein tablets.
Time to get off. Mel picked up his travel bag and mine. I had to uncouple these "hogs." We went out the door onto the catwalk. Mel's weight lifting and pill popping seemed to be working. His back was broad under the vest back of his coveralls.
A robust day was beginning, but I was spent. After a few formalities in the depot, I went over to the Pioneer Hotel and flopped for five or six hours.
It was hot in the sparsely finished room when I awoke. I shaved and showered and put on clothes that didn't smell of diesel. When I let up the shade, traffic was moving below my window in the afternoon sunlight.
Down the street at the Coffee Corral, I had lunch, avoiding the gravy. The old rails warnings weren't wasted on me. These greasy-spoon restaurants let the gravy stew on the steam table for days on end. Then some unsuspecting cowboy, or railroader, comes in and gets food poisoning from his hot-beef sandwich.
Walking through downtown
Out that way there is a park along the
That evening I called a guy I knew who lived about twenty miles north, on a ranch near
He met me at the Pioneer Hotel in his late model Buick, and went to a night club. Neither of us were good talkers, but we tried to make conversation over the noise of the band, an over-amplified bunch of guitar bangers. In the smoky, low-ceilinged room we eyed the available women at other tables. It just wasn't worth the effort. I drank enough that I slept pretty hard back at the hotel. The bourbon in that low-ball joint had suppressed even my dreams.
I didn't know then that I would spend the money I was making working on the railroad ski bumming in
Sure, I'm cynical. That's why I'm kicking along here in my sagebrush wasteland. As the sun gets lower in the sky, Meadowlarks start looking for places to light. The air is cooler where the road goes down again, along the streambed. I could have continued with psychology. I listen to people anyway. Always have. I couldn't charge seventy five bucks an hour, though, as a chiropractor of the mind. I'm not convinced there are answers to the kinds of questions most of us are asking, at least, not in the way they are being asked. Maybe the honest psychologists don't try to answer them. There are good psychologists and pastoral counselors around, but I think the good ones are good in spite of, not because of the ideologies they have been taught.
As far as I've been able to determine, some of the hardest questions aren't answered in the Bible, either. I carried a Bible in my travel bag on those railroad trips, to read about Abraham who never really knew where he was going, and Moses who only glimpsed the promised land. And, Jesus, beloved Master, I've waited for instructions, but you speak to me in parables. "A man finds a treasure in a field, and he goes and sells everything to buy that field." Then what? You have given me hope, Lord, I have the words of eternal life, but what am I to do with life? The past years seem to have been full of missed connections.
I'm willing. But I can't turn these stones into bread. Maybe you were tempted, and resisted the impulse, but I know how impotent my powers are; I've already thrown myself down from the pinnacle of the temple. If the angels hadn't caught me, I'd be singing with them in heaven by now. I admit I've lusted after a voice that soars above the crowd. Nobody has to bow down, but it would be nice if they would hear me out. It seems the only way to get an audience is to confidently tell people exactly what they want to hear. It helps, I suppose, if you have a long litany of academic honors.
Is this the way it is supposed to go, Jesus? If I had put my mind to work in the academic marketplace, could I have served you better? Or should most of what is written in journals be construed in a deconstructionist mode? Is scholarship just power networking? We don't want to get too smirky about it, with Pontius Pilate in his cynicism, "What is truth?"
Maybe I should have transferred to a school with a strong church affiliation. I would still be paying off loans. When the option was available, it didn't seem worth the trouble and expense to go to, say,
I started using more of my time on railroad layovers in the hotel room with my Bible--more interesting than the night clubs. Only after I'd had enough of Nehemiah or Obadiah, would I come downstairs for air.
In the lobby of the Pioneer Hotel I learned a few things as well--vital information about the famous, black-stud football player who made it in Hollywood and tried to penetrate what’s-her-name, Tarzana, the movie queen, while they were doing a love scene on camera. Mel Starr the body-builder fireman estimated with both hands, "He's probably got a wanger about that long on him."
Now a story like that would be enough to make a lot of Christians go back upstairs to the stuffy room and lock themselves inside. But a lot of what I'd been reading the "Good Book" was just as lurid, though slanted differently than the magazine Mel had been reading. Mrs. Kline, the proprietress, tried to keep that kind of literature off the tables the trainmen found at their elbow when there was time to kill.
There was a color television set in the lobby. I remember watching Tom Jones in a tuxedo against a background of lavender. He sang with a wide vibrato while women shrieked and threw motel-room keys on the stage. John, another young brakeman, a
Engineer Kilty was talking with the proprietress at the front desk. She and her daughters ran the Pioneer. It was clear that Mom was the brains of the operation. The girls were well endowed physically, but about a quart low intellectually. It showed in the way they applied their make-up. One of them spoke with a lisp. When I asked what kind of wooly little dog that was that followed her around while she made up the rooms, we took several runs at it before I could understand her answer. "Pekapoo," she was saying through the lisp. "Pekinese and Poodle."
The girls were watching television in the apartment behind the front desk that night when I approached to ask Kilty how late we might expect to be called to work. He said it would be after midnight. He was going to church with the proprietress. She spoke up and invited me, too. It was this religious side of Mrs. Kline that eased your mind about the possibility that she might be running the kind of operation John had been describing in
The two girls, Kilty, and I squeezed into Mrs. Kline's Rambler. She drove us out a red cinder-ash road. It was about sunset. A lava butte jutted up behind the Junipers along the road, where the lip and high arch of a ski jump were visible above the pines. I felt a little like a sportsman climbing the stairway to the top. I hoped the church service wasn't going to get too wild.
Kilty was getting pats on the back from Mrs. Kline. Embarrassed, but proud at the same time, he told me, "I quit drinkin', Kid. Didn't have much help, either."
I, for one, was glad he had. Trainmen sometimes get called before they can sober up. Half a million pounds of train going seventy miles and hour with a drunk on the engine is no joke.
The church service at the Assembly of God that night made me glad we were beyond the edge of town. It was fervent and loud. Energetic gospel hymns were accompanied by piano and the preacher's electric guitar. Reverend Hootin made quite an issue of the cigarette burns on that guitar. I gathered he, like Kilty, had been quite a "rounder." He had worked for years in a band on the country-music circuit. He'd played in half the taverns in
The first time he finished preaching, a young woman got up to sing. Kilty elbowed me and said, "That's Hootin's daughter." He assumed I'd be interested. I imagine I could have gotten interested. She was fresh as the Juniper-scented air drifting in the windows. The intense lighting in the room made her skin seem angelic. She could sing, too. "She's gettin' married," Kilty added, noticing how closely I paid attention. Rev. Hootin could well have been proud.
Hootin got up again. It was the time of night that truck drivers would be going home with the women in the places this minister used to work. Now, his appeal brought a lot of people forward. Most of them looked like church members in good standing, but they knelt on the red carpet. Some of them wept. We sang another hymn, then the piano player improvised, and we were left to contemplate eternity.
I guess I was looking at the carpet when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up into Hootin's benevolent face. "Do you know the Lord, Son?" He asked.
I think I surprised him by saying yes. He looked at me earnestly.
"That's real good," he said, and he patted my shoulder.
Kilty was watching me carefully for signs of cynicism. He was sheepish about his religion with the other railroaders, though he would allow it helped him stop drinking. If I was a believer, it was all right with him.
It must have been about three A.M. later that night when our crew was called to work, an ungodly hour to be awakened in a dark hotel room. "All right," I answered the voice outside the door, one of the other crewmen. I turned a switch, and brassy light filled the room.
Outside it was better. Cool air flooded the silent streets. Like a sailor in a foreign port, I walked along, swinging my travel bag. Switch engines were working in the yard. The occasional slam of boxcars coming together reverberated in the darkness.
Light dimly penetrated the windows in the stone-walled depot. In front of the mail room, baggage carts on large, spoked, steel wheels rested on the walks under awnings that ran the length of the building. Teletype machines clattered inside. Kilty handed me the train orders.
Ralph Brainard, the conductor off an incoming train, was talking with one of his crewmen. I listened without looking in his direction. They said he could be mean as hell. He had made it rough for one fireman, a long-haired nephew of some official in
As Kilty and I climbed the ladder up to the cab of the engine, air overflow was spurting out from between enormous wheels. We went inside and stowed our bags in the nose of this old Western Pacific "Flyer." Some of these Iron Horses should have been put out to pasture years ago. It was going to be a long pull up to Chemult.
We waited in the dark for the air pressure to build. Green gauges throbbed on the panel. Kilty wasn't happy about the "power." The engines were woefully inadequate for the length of the train. When he got it all rolling, the stretched-out tonnage behind us made the diesels lug down. Our oscillating headlight cut a slow swath ahead of us through the trees. Juniper again, you could smell it.
At the crossings our horns blared. Electric whistles on the new engines could knock a man off the catwalk if he was out front. These tired air horns just moaned.
It was a hard night, twenty miles an hour up the grade, engines conking out all the time. I had to crawl through the nose cowlings of engines coupled head to head to get to the rear units that needed to be restarted. Even at the speed we were moving, dust and creosote fumed up from the tracks in the light from my lantern.
We waited on nearly every siding for the Southern Pacific freights to crash through on the main line. Before we got up any momentum, it was daylight. The sun came up on the rim rocks along
We blew through Chiloquin making bells ring as the crossing gates came down. Indians who had traded their land rights and timber for Pontiac GTOs and Corvettes waited for us to pass. Sporting long black braids and wearing blankets and moccasins the squaws on
The rails gleamed as we rounded a long curve leaving town and went back into the trees. In forest clearings cattle grazed behind barbed wire fences. Grain was ripening toward
We had been following the
That's the way it goes. When I think I've lost the tedious argument that seems necessary just to go on, this malevolent world turns friendly and revives me.
The western sky is blood red over the horizon of my prairie wilderness now. Along a boggy stretch of the creek, under a few old cottonwoods, the birds are rejoicing in the cool of evening. Red Wing Blackbirds and Killdeers chatter in the unknown tongue. Here and there one of them darts from one cattail to another, or runs across the silt deposited by the water when it was higher. Insects swarm in the gathering gloom.
I'm no ascetic. The pilgrimage I'm on isn't that of a repentant sensualist--Tannhauser on the road to
That fall I went back to the
We took Mark along and roped him in with us for an ascent above the
On the way home I drove a friend's Land Rover because she was keeping company in the back with her visitors from
"You want me to dump you all at some tavern in
"Come on in back, Sweetie, I'll humor you a little." That was Wendy. She did humor me a little, too. But just then, I was driving. When I told her my experiences with sex hadn't been what I had in mind, she wondered why I was making excuses. Let's get closer. Was I impotent? Physically handicapped? Or what?
I can't remember what I was studying that quarter. Gives you some idea how I was doing. So when another friend, Roger, mentioned he was going skiing for the winter in
Roger was a business student. He didn't have the passion to be an entrepreneur. He was just tired of the kind of worry he had heard growing up. I don't remember if he told me what his father did for a living, but around home there had been a lot of, "What are we going to do, Honey? These bills!" He figured he had a choice--he could drop out and be a ski bum, maybe a rep for a ski manufacturer or something, or he could--eventually--knuckle down and get a degree in accounting and business. Last I heard, he was doing accounting for a lumber firm in
We figured a couple of clean cut college drop-outs could find work, before our money ran out, working nights in a restaurant, or doing building maintenance. Things worked out. Roger got a job at the lodge. His benefits included a season lift pass up on
Winter dampened all my wasted motion and anxiety in mounds of feathery snow. I was more vigorous in that removed climate, where the bubbling
I tuned up my skiing technique as never before and got sun tanned like a native of this winter spa. It was a joy, really, after the holidays when the high rollers left the valley to us poor devils who had nothing to our credit but virile bodies. The lift lines were short. Some days you could get twenty runs on great powder. It was steep and fast, and you kicked up a cold blizzard.
I wrote to my sister. She seemed to take some satisfaction in the improvement, and liked me better than the serious character she remembered, the one who went to church three times a week. She made plans to visit me on her spring break.
The women looked healthy. But you can't talk about skiing all the time. Dating anybody who had been here too long turned out to be frustrating. I tried to make it a rule not to. I met a woman with a degree in Art History from the
Life in a resort town can be a bit like a beer commercial. Why study medicine? Nobody here was sick. Larry didn't know what to make of it, though he seemed to enjoy himself. And it's a strange climate for a gloomy Christian. I went to church at a smallish Episcopal Church along the road to the lodge. The rector was like the church--smallish, subdued, and grey. He said the Eucharist in a manner that reflected his years at the altar. He seemed a sincere chap in the reception line at the door. "Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, Mrs. Hemingway." The elderly woman in front of me, in line with several other grey matrons in fur-trimmed tweeds, must have been the wife of the old, great, fighter who had made her into a widow in 1961, when he decided he'd had enough.
Around Ketchum there were people who still remembered Papa Hemingway. One of his sons, who had fished in the
But we were trying to analyze what a Christian was doing in a place that exists just for the fun of it. Well, I was skiing. Up on Baldy in the bright sunlight I could see without my glasses. Things cleared up, as if my myopia had been a bad dream. Being half blind had bothered me all through childhood. Now I had a few blurry nights, but most of the time I was fine. A remarkable thought gave me pause one crisp silent day on a back trail. I was happy here. I liked getting up early in the morning with nothing to do but ride up Old Baldy and ski down. It made no rational sense. What would the Desert Fathers make of this? The martyrs? I wasn't debauching in high style like the wife swappers and politicians I waited on down at Warm Springs. I behaved myself, but even as a kitchen servant I was living in pretty breezy style. I skied the wild bumps on Exhibition, a run named for the hot-shots who showed their stuff on that monstrous steep stretch right under the chairlift. The physical demands exhilarated me, but what good was that? What good was my life? I didn't spend too much time pondering such questions. Still the logic was self evident. I knew--subconsciously, if you will--that the world was still violent and absurd.
Some mornings I stayed home to read or write. In previous years I had felt, appropriately or not, a strong sense of alienation. At first it was just not being a good talker, then religion complicated things. So I wrote from the point of view of somebody who couldn't settle down or fit in--a draft dodger, a vagabond. In fact, twenty years now have past, and I have considerable guilt about having gone to school to avoid the draft, and then going to the library to avoid the war on campus. People took one side or other of that bitter controversy. I kept trying to convince myself it wasn't my fight. Maybe it wasn't. I've taken some ground in the battle I've been waging.
Roger and I sort of lost track of one another. We would make a few runs together now and then. My skiing technique didn't go to pot, but I tended to go home fairly early in the afternoon.
Spring came abruptly with the hordes of vacationing students who arrived late in March, who got on my nerves. And the snow wasn't as good with the warm weather. I started to lose touch with my surroundings.
When my sister arrived, she wondered what had happened to the clever celebrative person with whom she had been corresponding. We went skiing, but it wasn't the way I had described it. Baldy seemed more like an ant hill than a magic mountain. There were maniacs everywhere. The snow was rutted and dirty. A couple of falls demoralized me even more. She was nearly in tears. "I thought you were happy here," she said. I think she felt that having a kid sister in town had somehow broken a run of good luck for me.
It may have seemed that I wasn't doing anything that mattered to anybody but me--selfish enjoyment. But my sister wanted me to be happy, and she must have felt something about her own prospects. If I was able to do more than grind through my twenties, maybe she could too. A few years later when she left a job she didn't like, and moved to
To hell with the Desert Rats and the psychologists! It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but what do I have to give, if what I am is a drudge. When the opportunity presented itself, I got involved with music in a big way. Instead of being satisfied singing in the chorus, I began vocal coaching as a soloist. My voice needed work, but it was potentially a good instrument, worth the effort. I had three octaves of range, and a dramatic timbre. I also had stage fright, money problems, allergies, and the kind of undemonstrative personality that disposes one to be what theatre people call a rock onstage. These problems can be overcome, if you have that hunger to be a performing artist, and a thrilling voice that will carry to the back of a large auditorium. No measure of talent or vocal endowment will save you from misjudgments of the kind the juries and I made about my voice, and of course, relatively few people care about real singing anymore. The Metropolitan Opera interests them less than a music video. Placido Domingo could be in town, and they would just as soon stick in a Madonna tape.
I was soon studying with the best teacher I could find in
I worked in fast food joints and sawmills. Then I thought selling would be flexible enough to work around my lessons and rehearsals; I tried real estate, Amway. There seemed to be no way to just make a living and keep body and voice together. Employers want people motivated by money.
You don't make an operatic voice selling your soul in nightclubs. When I made money singing, it was for people so old they remembered Caruso. After several months in a sawmill I was ready for the pyramid-marketing pitch--whatever you want, they'll tell you--this is the way to get it. A lot of nice people are involved in pyramid schemes. Some of the plans are alright if you remember they are for highly motivated, sales-oriented people. The people who succeed, against the odds, in these businesses are driven to get rich the way evangelists are to saving souls.
A little of that goes a long way. Why not just get a normal job? That had reasonable ring to it, and I remember the day I interviewed at Household Finance in downtown
"No, Mr. Thayer, I'm not threatening you. That isn't a threat; it's a promise! Two payments by the end of the month. Or it's going to get rough."
My mind wandered. It was a warm autumn day in the city. Outside, down three floors, on the street corner was a guy carrying a rucksack. The breeze ruffled his blondish hair as he stood waiting in the sunshine for the traffic signal. He looked as if he wasn't going to be around here much longer than it took for that light to change, before he headed back to
Since I didn't know, or care, I had some fun. The manager, apparently a man who valued assertiveness, was keeping me waiting. I told the receptionist, "I've been here well past the time of my scheduled interview. If Mr. Whatever-his-name-was doesn't have time to see me, I have another appointment."
People scurried around the office, and pretty soon he showed up. The employment agency said he was impressed. No doubt he was waiting for me to follow through and come back to ask for the job. Then he could grind down the financial records I had given him--and try to figure out what I had been doing for these past few years. But I had heard enough waiting for the first interview.
There were better things to do than breaking people’s backs, collecting for a loan shark. If I could just get my high notes working, I'd be on my way. My two octaves usable in performance made everybody assume I was a tenor. I had a dark dramatic timbre, a voice that could make all of us a lot of money--the coaches, teachers, and me. Of course, the people who ran the workshops and drama studios were already making money off my voice. I sang for everybody who would listen. The pros, almost invariably, said I had a big fish of a voice if I could just reel it in.
The teacher who got me started was on the faculty of
My teacher had a PhD. from the
I was too old for most of the girls at
Money problems were getting the better of me anyway, and I wasn't there long. I got a job as a salesman for a company that specialized in institutional food-service equipment. Making the rounds of restaurants and nursing homes runs up car expenses. It was being thrifty that led to my first consummated sexual experience. I know, you thought I was already Don Giovanni.
Loretta was the afternoon attendant at a Jackpot service station along highway 26, out toward
Once I asked her what was for dinner. She said, "We'll think of something, if you're coming."
What am I supposed to do with that lead? "If you're inviting me, you'll have to tell me where you live."
She drew me a map.
"What time?"
"Any time."
"See you later."
Don't expect me to make it sound as if she seduced me. She was modest. Gas station girls aren't easy, even if you're as sexy as I am. It was a couple of evenings before we left her sofa for the bedroom. We were falling asleep. She was yawning, waiting for me to make my move. Even in the bedroom it wasn't Samson and Delilah. We went to sleep. About two in the morning we woke up, inhibitions gone. She said, "I could screw you this minute and not think twice about it." There weren't many clothes left to take off.
I had to work the next day and went home to crash for a few hours. There was no hangover. Things seemed to be alright. But now I had a relationship, whether I was ready for it or not. It wasn't the last time I went for dinner. The places I could afford to take her weren't much. She was unhappy. I was preoccupied. It wasn't only money problems I was always thinking about.
She had a horse called Chance that she corralled east of town for twenty bucks a month. I went to watch her ride, one rainy day in April. For an hour I thought we might have a meeting of minds.
She bounced around bareback and chirped orders at the speckled horse as he trotted around the muddy corral. Her cropped sandy brown hair was getting wet from the mist in the air.
It angered her that I wouldn't stay all night the second time we ended up in bed together. "What is this!" She yelled as I went out mad. I thought about it as I drove out of the mobile home park where she lived. Well, what was it? It was an accident, I guess, like a car wreck in front of the Jackpot. There were injuries that took a while to heal. Other men were interested. It was only a few weeks until she called to say one of them was working out better than I was. So much for the white heat of passion. I had a dose of nonspecific urethritis along with my memories.
None of it would have happened if I had been able to work single mindedly on music. I was lucky to spend an hour during the daylight in the library with recordings. I practiced at night, and went home discouraged. The company for which I was working was in as bad shape as I was. People were interviewing with the competition. I started saving money for a break.
When in doubt, go back to school. The
My money held out until I had a job in the
I was happy just to be out of mercantile; the business world had seemed dead to most of what I cared about. The university overlooked
One day I was hard at work down at the
"Is that an opera?" He asked.
"No, it's a boiled down string quartet by Mozart, an analysis exercise." I said.
"Oh." He started to leave.
"Are you a musician?" I queried.
"Yes," he said in a lofty tone of voice as he threw back his raven hair. "I'm bulking up in the weight room for my return to the stage--as Siefried/Tristan."
"You mean you're a heldentenor?" I gaped.
"Yeah."
He looked as if he might have the power to make himself heard above Wagner's orchestration. Most heldentenors are truck-driver types who are discovered after the conservatory musicians have been beat down fighting Wagner measure after impassioned measure.
But this guy was playing games with me. He was a Wagner fanatic, but the first thing he sang for me was a tune called The Owl and the Pussycat accompanied by his own guitar plucking. He was a sophisticated savage, whether Wolsung or Native American. Barefoot most of the time, he wore cut off blue jeans with threads hanging, and T-shirts of various colors, extra large.
The weight lifting he was doing seemed like good idea. I hadn't pumped iron since I was at
We harassed one another into some modest gains in the number of Olympic plates we could load on the barbell. In the process we got acquainted with some of the real power lifters in the gym--soft spoken most of them. Very different from football players, these guys seldom give anybody a hard time. They aren't hostile aggressive types. The most disturbance they ever make is groaning under a clean and jerk.
David was also quite a good pianist, though he didn't like to work anything out completely. We fought our way through some Donizetti and a little Verdi in the practice room. I was still having high note trouble, and some of it was pretty bad. Mostly we listened to recordings from the extensive opera collection with which he shared a small basement room. He got interested in the woman who moved in at my place when Neil left.
There were sopranos whom I noticed. One in my Italian class, I got together with for a while. We conjugated verbs together. Another sang at the Congregational Church where my voice teacher was the section leader in the choir. Paula was sweet. Most sopranos were so absorbed with voice culture that you could hardly get their attention until after the spring juries were over. Like movie queens and their figures. Can't blame them. Opera is a merciless business, different from
About this time, a friend from
Directing the choir at Bethany Presbyterian brought back some struggles with my convictions. Music is a little like skiing in
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