Fantastic Zoot and Bros. Gundy Rose.
The public is invited
To hear Sen. Nick Begich6
(And of course Gen. Curtis LeMay
On Vietnam)
(Funnies)
“Come I will take you to my Unde who was fired.”
“Good.”
“Uncle Salvador
Señor Sawyer is not
What we thought.”
“Something is wrong at the mine.”
Uncle Salvador remains proud
And turns away (Thinks): “You’ll get
No help from me!”
Says: “Why are they flooding
The exploratory channel
At the 3700 foot level?”
Tigers win pennant
Drenched in champagne while
Crowds in darkness chant
“We want Tigers.”
On this day (Wednesday Sept. 18)
Aries shall “utilize showmanship
Dress up product” and Taurus should
“Strive to be specific—no beating
Around the bush.” Gemini “be complete
Not fragmentary.” LIBRA
(Well frankly it’s a good day for Libra with “a Virgo individual Tonight”)
“Romantic interests are spurred…”
All is glamor today for lucky
Libra. And Scorpio should stop grumbling
“About overtime.”
And final word
To Aries “Compile facts.”
As to Aquarius (my own
Self in workshop) “Necessity of public
Relations. Some around you are ultra-
Sensitive. Older person
Wants to be heard!” (I pray that’s Mother Rita Mary!)
Russian space ship returns from moon.
Helicopter shot down in Vietnam.
Students rioting in Mexico City (for days).
Fair today, high in fifties (again).
Turned it off before the football news came on.
First Ecstasy of Rama Krishna7
One day in June or July when he was six years old he was walking along a narrow path between ricefields, eating puffed rice from a basket. He looked up at the sky and saw a beautiful storm cloud, and a flight of snow white cranes passing in front of it, above him. He lost consciousness and fell into a faint at the beauty of it. A peasant found him with rice scattered all about and carried him home.
September 19, 1968. Alaska
Louisville—Christ of the Desert—Jicarilla Apache Reservation—Santa Fe—Chicago—Anchorage—Eagle River Convent.
I am now here on a bright cold morning and the first thin dusty snow is on the lower hills. Mt. McKinley is visible in the distance from the Precious Blood Convent. Next to which I live in a trailer (very comfortable).
On the morning of the 10th I went down to the monastery for the last time to get some money, pick up mail, say goodbye to Fr. Flavian, Bros. Maurice and Patrick. No one else much knew anything about my departure. Ron Seitz came about ten. A grey cool, fall morning. We drove into Louisville. I got travelers checks, medicine in St. Matthews. An AWOL bag for camera, second pair of shoes, etc. Afternoon—a shower and short rest at O’Callaghans and in the evening a supper send-off party that probably could have been better done without. But no matter. Dan Walsh was there and I hadn’t seen him for a long time. I slept at St. Bonaventure’s Friary and got out early in the morning. Flew to Chicago, then Albuquerque.
I was met at the airport in Albuquerque by Tom Carlyle, a very likable hippie type who is staying at Christ of the Desert and working for them. A really good, sincere, spiritual person. One of the best. We drove up in his Volkswagen—dragging a plaster mixer with which he plans to make adobe brick for the monks.
Two days’ retreat in the canyon. Swam in the cold Chama.
Then to the Jicarilla Apache encampment feast on the reservation near Dulce. A feast of Tabernacles. Booths of boughs, tents and campfires everywhere. Then the race the next day. Back to Santa Fe. Slept at the Devereuxs’ in Reyena Madre. Low adobe house. Supper at the Pink Adobe—good curry but too much of it.
Flew from Albuquerque to Chicago (last sight of distant Pedernal quite clear!). Rain in Chicago. Went to the new Poor Clare convent and gave them a talk; liked the architecture. Ed Noonan, the architect, came for Mass next day—I concelebrated with Fr. Xavier Carroll who took me to the plane—with one of the Sisters who was leaving.
The Northwest plane for Anchorage, Tokyo and Seoul was late getting started. Crowded with families, American and ]apanese, returning to Asia. I felt for the first time that Asia was getting close!
The flight to Alaska was mostly over clouds. Quiet. A soldier on the outside seat; the middle seat of the three empty. We didn’t talk except for a little bit just before landing. (He said Anchorage wasn’t any colder in winter than Syracuse, N.Y., but that there was a lot of snow.)
The clouds opened over Mt. St. Elias and after that I was overwhelmed by the vastness, the patterns of glaciers, the burnished copper sheen of the sun on the bright blue sea. The shore line. The bare purple hills. The high mountains full of snow, the dark islands stark in the sun—burnish on the water.
We swung slowly down into Anchorage and got out into cold, clear, autumn air. Everywhere the leaves have turned. Gold of the aspens and birches everywhere.
Without going actually into Anchorage we (Msgr. [John] Lunney met me) drove out on Route 1 to the convent, at Eagle River.
It is a nice house among the birches, at the foot of low mountains, looking out through the trees toward Cook Inlet and Mount McKinley—the nuns may move in a few months as the place is not quite suitable.
I have a sense of great warmth and generosity in the clergy here. The Archbishop is away at Juneau but will be back next week—all are very eager to help and I feel they are eager to have me settle here. Meanwhile I’m busy on a workshop with the nuns. They are a good community, and like all, they have their troubles.
This afternoon—in the sun at the foot of a birch, in the bushes near the monastery at a point where you can see Mt. McKinley and Mt. Foraker—great, silent and beautiful presence in the afternoon sun.
September 21, 1968. Eagle River
“One will understand the extent to which the anthropological realities of our everyday experiences are deformed by sin and correspond little to the pure norms of the new creation which is being realized in the Church. Actually, the individual who possesses a part of nature and reserves it for himself, the subject who defines himself by opposition to all that which is not ‘I,’ is not the person or hypostasis who shares nature in common with others and who exists as person in a positive relationship to other persons. Self-will…is not identical to the will of the new creation—to the will which one finds in renouncing oneself, in the unity of the Body of Christ, wherein the canons of the Church make us recognize a common and individual will. Not the properties of an individual nature, but the unique relationship of each being with God—a relationship by the Holy Spirit and realized in grace—is what constitutes the uniqueness of a human person.”8
September 22, 1968. Sunday
6 a.m. on KHAR Anchorage; Alaskan Golden Nugget Potatoes respectfully suggest that we worship God since we are a nation under God and want to build a stronger America. Nugget Potatoes are glad of this opportunity to “voice this thinking.” A good thought from a respectful potato.
Yesterday—end of worship—visit of Precious Blood priests—not without a song and Ole Man River. Evening—to the army base at Ft. Richardson—like city of shiny apartments—bourbon on the rocks—tarpon fishing on TV—wild ducks in slow motion flight—memories of Brooklyn. And supper at the Air Force base at Elmendorf (like city of shiny apartments). Heated argument between conservative and progressive clergy and laity: which is better: to kneel for communion or to stand?
September 23, 1968
Anchorage Daily News advises Aquarius to read travel folders. I thumb through
my tickets to Los Angeles, Honolulu, Bangkok, Calcutta, Katmandu…and am eager to get going.
Climbed a mountain behind the convent, and looked out over the vast valley—Mt. McKinley—the Alaska Range—far off Redoubt Volcano and Iliamna.
Today I go to Cordova.
Graffiti in toilet—Anchorage Airport.
On the whole much more tame than usual.
For instance: “Vote for Nixon”—(spelled NIXION)
“Peace and good will to your fellow men!”
Someone declares he is on his way to Vietnam.
Another states: “Missouri is best.”
Which draws the only dirty comment: “For assholes.”
On the whole a very genteel set of announcements and no pictorial matter.
Another graffiti “Hickel has crabs” (Hickel is the governor).
September 23, 1968. Cordova
Landed at the cool, lovely airfield shortly after dawn. Still freezing. I rode into town on the airport bus—a school bus—with a bunch of duck hunters, very voluble about their luck and about the good weather which is bad for them as the ducks and geese have not begun to move south.
Ducks in the water of the Copper River Delta.
I find St. Joseph’s Church, no one around. I walk in the rectory and after a while Fr. Llorente arrives—a remarkable person, a Spanish Jesuit who got himself sent to the Yukon 30 years ago and has been in Alaska ever since—has become a sort of legend in the region. He was going to leave to work with Mexican migrants in California, but was needed for Cordova…He stayed.
A small fishing town between steep mountains and blue water—a highway on one side, and Eyak Lake around at the back.
I have no hesitation in saying Eyak Lake seemed perfect in many ways-for a place to live. The quiet end of it is several miles back in the mountains, completely isolated, silent. Wild geese were feeding there. Great silver salmon were turning red and dying in shallows where they had spawned (some had been half eaten by bears). Bears would be the only problem but Fr. Llorente said they were not grizzlies. A few cabins nearer town were attractive. Also the way was impressive.
Other ideas of Fr. Llorente: Yakutat and a shrine (abandoned) of the Little Flower outside Juneau (many sea lions there).
Plans had been for me to go to Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak tomorrow but I am going to Matanuska Valley instead.
September 24, 1968. Valdez (Valdeez)
At the far end of a long blue arm of water, full of islands. The bush pilot flies low over the post office thinking it to be the Catholic Church—to alert the priest we are arriving.
The old town of Valdez, wrecked by earthquake, tidal wave. Still some buildings leaning into shallow salt water. Others, with windows smashed by a local drunkard. I think I have lost the roll of film I took in Valdez and the mountains (from the plane).
Most impressive mountains I have seen in Alaska: Drum and Wrangell and the third great massive one whose name I forget, rising out of the vast birchy plain of Copper Valley. They are sacred and majestic mountains, ominous, enormous, noble, stirring. You want to attend to them. I could not keep my eyes off them. Beauty and terror of the Chugach. Dangerous valleys. Points. Saws. Snowy nails.
September 26, 1968. Anchorage
Noises as the bishop’s house awakes—noise of heat tapping in the walls, of water running, of plates being set, of the feet of domestic prelates on carpeted floors, creaking of floorboards where there is movement overhead to left and to right. Feet on stairs. Cutlery. Crockery. Planes coming down to FAA airport beyond the birches outside.
Today I fly to Juneau with Archbishop Ryan. Then to Ketchikan tomorrow and back to Anchorage Saturday.
Sound of chapel door closing as Bishop comes down to say his office before breakfast (Mass tonight—concelebration in Juneau).
The bishop’s house is warm and quiet. It smells of bacon.
Plane grounded. We cannot go to Juneau where the Archbishop had planned a clergy conference and concelehration this evening. Flight tomorrow perhaps to Yakutat.
Haircut in Anchorage Westward Hotel. Manuel, an artist in hairstyles, found little to do on me, but spoke of what he had learned about wigs in Heidelberg. “Inexpensive!” He emphasized this. A nasty hint!
The Bishop is tired and will go to rest—which is only right. I write postcards and letters. Letter to Fr. Flavian on an electric typewriter in the Chancery Office (second one. A better report than yesterday’s).
I walk briefly through the streets of Anchorage, viewing the huge lift of land after the 1964 earthquake, looking out at the barges drilling for oil in Cook Inlet. The mountains to the west are hidden in fog and snow clouds. Behind the city, the tops are powdered with clean snow.
I have a reservation for San Francisco on the 2nd. Plan to sleep there. A letter came from Suzanne B.,9 so maybe I’ll have supper with her. She said she had read in Ralph Gleason’s column that I had left the monastery and was going to Tibet. October 3rd I am supposed to go to Santa Barbara, and have a conference at the Center [for Democratic Institutions] on the 4th (no—3rd).
Behind Palmer: Pioneer Peak, badly named, tall and black and white in the snow—mist, rugged armatures, indestructible, great. It vanishes into snow cloud as we retreat up the valley into birch flats. McKinley hidden.
The log house of Mr. and Mrs. Peck by the windy lake. Clouds of blowing aspen and birch leaves fly across the lawn. Mr. Peck with an army field jacket and a good Dutch cigar—brought by the big silent boy from KLM who sits with a bottle of bourbon in the shadows of the kitchen.
Mrs. Peck’s sister has half finished an enormous jigsaw puzzle which occupies a whole table. Mrs. Peck, a lovely, ageless Eskimo woman, plump, broad Asian smile, like the faces of Nepalese tribes in the book I saw today (Anchorage Public Library).
September 27, 1968. Yakutat
Bay with small islands. Driving rain on the docks. A few fishing boats. Beat-up motorboats, very poor. An old battered green rowboat called The Jolly Green Giant.
It is a village of Indians, with an FAA station nearby. Battered houses. A small Indian girl opens the door of the general store. Looks back at us as we pass. Cannery buildings falling down. Old tracks are buried in mud and grass. A dilapidated building was once a “roundhouse” though it is a large rectangle. After that, all there is is a long straight gravel road pointing in the mist between tall hemlocks out into the nowhere where more of the same will be extended to a lumber operation. The woods are full of moose, and black bear, and brown bear, and even a special bear found only at Yakutat—the glacier bear (or blue bear).
Frank Ryman had in his lodge the skin of a wolf—as big as a small bear.
Yakutat has plenty of wolves and coyotes, besides bears.
And in the village are many murders.
Tlingit Indians.
Here there was once a Russian penal colony. It was wiped out by the Indians.
Yakutat—one of the only—perhaps the only place that is on Yukon time. All the other places have adopted one of the other timebelts, Anchorage or Pacific.
September 27, 1968. Juneau
Alone in the empty bishop’s house at Juneau (he has retired10—the see is vacant) after concelebration, dinner, and conference at the Cathedral. Driving rain, and a long spectacular thin waterfall down the side of the mountain becomes, in a concrete channel outside the house, the fastest torrent I have ever seen. It must he running fifty miles an hour into the choppy hay.
This morning—we flew in bad weather to Yakutat, came down out of thick clouds on to a shore full of surf and hemlock and muskeg. Desolate airstrip.
Frank Ryman drove us into the village to show me the village. Broken down houses, mostly inhabited by Tlingit Indians, an old fish cannery, and a small dock with a few fishing boats on a lovely broad bay with islands. Everything seemed covered with hemlock. Driving rain, mountains invisible. Frank Ryman has a quarter acre of land he offered me—and it is enough to put a trailer on. But it is right at the edge of the village. If I
lived there I would become very involved in the life of the village and would probably become a sort of pastor.
We left Yakutat after dinner (at Ryman’s “lodge” out at the airstrip), flew in rain to Juneau which turns out to be a fascinating place clinging to the feet of several mountains at the edge of a sort of fjord. I never saw such torrential rain as met us when we got out of the plane!
Earlier in the week; visit Cordova on Monday. The road that goes around to the back of Eyak Lake is one of the most beautiful places in Alaska—silent, peaceful, among high mountains, wild geese and ducks on the flats. Perhaps in many ways the best place I have seen so far. The hay there, too, is magnificent.
Tuesday we flew with a bush pilot—over the mountains and glaciers to Valdez. Then up through the pass in the Chugach to Copper Valley and Copper Center school, with the Wrangell Mountains beyond it. And down again through the Matanuska Valley to Anchorage.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 23