by Jack Kerouac
Talkin of Bowery shrouds, what about Charley Mills walkin down the street with bums drinkin his bottle of wine singing in twelve tone scale.
“Let’s go see the strange great secret painters of America and discuss their paintings and their visions with them—Iris Brodie with her delicate fawn Byzantine filigree of Virgins—”
“Or Miles Forst and his black bull in the orange cave.”
“Or Franz Klein and his spiderwebs.”
“His bloody spiderwebs!”
“Or Willem de Kooning and his White.”
“Or Robert De Niro.”
“Or Dody Muller and her Annunciations in seven feet tall flowers.”
“Or Al Leslie and his giant feet canvases.”
“Al Leslie’s giant is sleeping in the Paramount building.”
There’s another great painter, his name is Bill Heine, he’s a really secret subterranean painter who sits with all those weird new cats in the East Tenth street coffeeshops that dont look coffeeshops at all but like sorta Henry Street basement secondhand clothes stores except you see an African sculpture or maybe a Mary Frank sculpture over the door and inside they play Frescobaldi on the hi fi.
AH, LET’S GO BACK TO THE VILLAGE and stand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and watch the intellectuals go by.— AP reporters lurching home to their basement apartments on Washington Square, lady editorialists with huge German police dogs breaking their chains, lonely dikes melting by, unknown experts on Sherlock Holmes with blue fingernails going up to their rooms to take scopolamine, a muscle-bound young man in a cheap gray German suit explaining something weird to his fat girl friend, great editors leaning politely at the newsstand buying the early edition of the Times, great fat furniture movers out of 1910 Charlie Chaplin films coming home with great bags full of chop suey (feeding everybody), Picasso’s melancholy harlequin now owner of a print and frame shop musing on his wife and newborn child lifting up his finger for a taxi, rolypoly recording engineers rush in fur hats, girl artists down from Columbia with D. H. Lawrence problems picking up 50-year-old men, old men in the Kettle of Fish, and the melancholy spectre of New York Women’s prison that looms high and is folded in silence as the night itself—at sunset their windows look like oranges—poet e. e. cummings buying a package of cough drops in the shade of that monstrosity.— If it’s raining you can stand under the awning in front of Howard Johnson’s and watch the street from the other side.
Beatnik Angel Peter Orlovsky in the supermarket five doors away buying Uneeda Biscuits (late Friday night), ice cream, caviar, bacon, pretzels, sodapop, TV Guide, Vaseline, three toothbrushes, chocolate milk (dreaming of roast suckling pig), buying whole Idaho potatoes, raisin bread, wormy cabbage by mistake, and fresh-felt tomatoes and collecting purple stamps.— Then he goes home broke and dumps it all on the table, takes out a big book of Mayakovsky poems, turns on the 1949 television set to the horror movie, and goes to sleep.
And this is the beat night life of New York.
6. ALONE ON A MOUNTAINTOP
AFTER ALL THIS KIND OF FANFARE, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of “thinking” and “enjoying” what they call “living,” I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds —
They say, too, in ancient scripture:—“Wisdom can only be obtained from the viewpoint of solitude.”
And anyway I was sick and tired of all the ships and railroads and Times Squares of all time —
I applied with the U.S. Agriculture Department for a job as a fire lookout in the Mount Baker National Forest in the High Cascades of the Great Northwest.
Just to look at these words made me shiver to think of cool pine trees by a morning lake.
I beat my way out to Seattle three thousand miles from the heat and dust of eastern cities in June.
ANYBODY WHO’S BEEN TO SEATTLE and missed Alaskan Way, the old water front, has missed the point—here the totem-pole stores, the waters of Puget Sound washing under old piers, the dark gloomy look of ancient warehouses and pier sheds, and the most antique locomotives in America switching boxcars up and down the water front, give a hint, under the pure cloud-mopped sparkling skies of the Northwest, of great country to come. Driving north from Seattle on Highway 99 is an exciting experience because suddenly you see the Cascade Mountains rising on the northeast horizon, truly Komo Kulshan under their uncountable snows.— The great peaks covered with trackless white, worlds of huge rock twisted and heaped and sometimes almost spiraled into fanstastic unbelievable shapes.
All this is seen far above the dreaming fields of the Stilaquamish and Skagit valleys, agricultural flats of peaceful green, the soil so rich and dark it is proudly referred to by inhabitants as second only to the Nile in fertility. At Milltown Washington your car rolls over the bridge across the Skagit River.— To the left—seaward, westward—the Skagit flows into Skagit Bay and the Pacific Ocean.— At Burlington you turn right and head for the heart of the mountains along a rural valley road through sleepy little towns and one bustling agricultural market center known as Sedro-Woolley with hundreds of cars parked aslant on a typical country-town Main Street of hardware stores, grain-and-feed stores and five-and-tens.— On deeper into the deepening valley, cliffs rich with timber appearing by the side of the road, the narrowing river rushing more swiftly now, a pure translucent green like the green of the ocean on a cloudy day but a saltless rush of melted snow from the High Cascades—almost good enough to drink north of Marblemount.— The road curves more and more till you reach Concrete, the last town in Skagit Valley with a bank and a five-and-ten—after that the mountains rising secretly behind foothills are so close that now you don’t see them but begin to feel them more and more.
At Marblemount the river is a swift torrent, the work of the quiet mountains.— Fallen logs beside the water provide good seats to enjoy a river wonderland, leaves jiggling in the good clean northwest wind seem to rejoice, the topmost trees on nearby timbered peaks swept and dimmed by low-flying clouds seem contented.—The clouds assume the faces of hermits or of nuns, or sometimes look like sad dog acts hurrying off into the wings over the horizon.— Snags struggle and gurgle in the heaving bulk of the river.— Logs rush by at twenty miles an hour. The air smells of pine and sawdust and bark and mud and twigs—birds flash over the water looking for secret fish.
As you drive north across the bridge at Marble-mount and on to Newhalem the road narrows and twists until finally the Skagit is seen pouring over rocks, frothing, and small creeks come tumbling from steep hillsides and pile right in.— The mountains rise on all sides, only their shoulders and ribs visible, their heads out of sight and now snowcapped.
At Newhalem extensive road construction raises a cloud of dust over shacks and cats and rigs, the dam there is the first in a series that create the Skagit watershed which provides all the power for Seattle.
The road ends at Diablo, a peaceful company settlement of neat cottages and green lawns surrounded by close packed peaks named Pyramid and Colonial and Davis.— Here a huge lift takes you one thousand feet up to the level of Diablo Lake and Diablo Dam.— Over the dam pours a jet roar of water through which a stray log could go shooting out like a toothpick in a one-thousand-foot arc.— Here for the first time you’re high enough really to begin to see the Cascades. Dazzles of light to the north show where Ross Lake sweeps back all the way to Canada, opening a view of the Mt. Baker National Forest as spectacular as any vista in the Colorado Rockies.
The Seattle City Light and Power boat leaves on regular schedule from a little pier near Diablo Dam and heads north between steep timbered rocky cliffs toward Ross Dam, about half an hour’s ride. The passengers are power employees, hunters and fishermen and forestry workers. Below Ross Dam the footwork begins—you must climb a rocky trail one thousand feet to the level of the dam. Here the vast lake opens out, disclosing small resort floats offering rooms and boats for vacationists, and just beyond, the floats of the U.S. Forestry Servic
e. From this point on, if you’re lucky enough to be a rich man or a forest-fire lookout, you can get packed into the North Cascade Primitive Area by horse and mule and spend a summer of complete solitude.
I WAS A FIRE LOOKOUT and after two nights of trying to sleep in the boom and slap of the Forest Service floats, they came for me one rainy morning—a powerful tugboat lashed to a large corral float bearing four mules and three horses, my own groceries, feed, batteries and equipment.— The muleskinner’s name was Andy and he wore the same old floppy cowboy hat he’d worn in Wyoming twenty years ago. “Well, boy, now we’re gonna put you away where we cant reach ya—you better get ready.”
“It’s just what I want, Andy, be alone for three solid months nobody to bother me.”
“It’s what you’re sayin’ now but you’ll change your tune after a week.”
I didnt believe him.— I was looking forward to an experience men seldom earn in this modern world: complete and comfortable solitude in the wilderness, day and night, sixty-three days and nights to be exact. We had no idea how much snow had fallen on my mountain during the winter and Andy said: “If there didnt it means you gotta hike two miles down that hard trail every day or every other day with two buckets, boy. I aint envyin’ you—I been back there. And one day it’s gonna be hot and you’re about ready to broil, and bugs you cant even count ‘em, and next day a li’P ole summer blizzard come hit you around the corner of Hozomeen which sits right there near Canada in your back yard and you wont be able to stick logs fast enough in that potbelly stove of yours.”—But I had a full rucksack loaded with turtleneck sweaters and warm shirts and pants and long wool socks bought on the Seattle water front, and gloves and an earmuff cap, and lots of instant soup and coffee in my grub list.
“Shoulda brought yourself a quart of brandy, boy,” says Andy shaking his head as the tug pushed our corral float up Ross Lake through the log gate and around to the left dead north underneath the immense rain shroud of Sourdough Mountain and Ruby Mountain.
“Where’s Desolation Peak?” I asked, meaning my own mountain (A mountain to be kept forever, I’d dreamed all that spring) (O lonesome traveler!)
“You aint gonna see it today till we’re practically on top it and by that time you’ll be so soakin’ wet you wont care.”
Assistant Ranger Marty Gohlke of Marblemount Ranger Station was with us too, also giving me tips and instructions. Nobody seemed to envy Desolation Peak except me. After two hours pushing through the storming waves of the long rainy lake with dreary misty timber rising steeply on both sides and the mules and horses chomping on their feedbags patient in the downpour, we arrived at the foot of Desolation Trail and the tugman (who’d been providing us with good hot coffee in the pilot cabin) eased her over and settled the float against a steep muddy slope full of bushes and fallen trees.— The muleskinner whacked the first mule and she lurched ahead with her double-sided pack of batteries and canned goods, hit the mud with forehoofs, scrambled, slipped, almost fell back in the lake and finally gave one mighty heave and went skittering out of sight in the fog to wait on the trail for the other mules and her master.— We all got off, cut the barge loose, waved to the tug man, mounted our horses and started up a sad and dripping party in heavy rain.
At first the trail, always steeply rising, was so dense with shrubbery we kept getting shower after shower from overhead and against our out-saddled knees.— The trail was deep with round rocks that kept causing the animals to slip.— At one point a great fallen tree made it impossible to go on until Old Andy and Marty went ahead with axes and cleared a short cut around the tree, sweating and cursing and hacking as I watched the animals.— By-and-by they were ready but the mules were afraid of the rough steepness of the short cut and had to be prodded through with sticks.-—Soon the trail reached alpine meadows powdered with blue lupine everywhere in the drenching mists, and with little red poppies, tiny-budded flowers as delicate as designs on a small Japanese teacup.— Now the trail zigzagged widely back and forth up the high meadow.—Soon we saw the vast foggy heap of a rock-cliff face above and Andy yelled “Soon’s we get up high as that we’re almost there but that’s another two thousand feet though you think you could reach up and touch it!”
I unfolded my nylon poncho and draped it over my head, and, drying a little, or, rather, ceasing to drip, I walked alongside the horse to warm my blood and began to feel better. But the other boys just rode along with their heads bowed in the rain. As for altitude all I could tell was from some occasional frightening spots on the trail where we could look down on distant treetops.
The alpine meadow reached to timber line and suddenly a great wind blew shafts of sleet on us.— “Gettin’ near the top now!” yelled Andy—and suddenly there was snow on the trail, the horses were chumping through a foot of slush and mud, and to the left and right everything was blinding white in the gray fog.— “About five and a half thousand feet right now” said Andy rolling a cigarette as he rode in the rain.—
We went down, then up another spell, down again, a slow gradual climb, and then Andy yelled “There she is!” and up ahead in the mountaintop gloom I saw a little shadowy peaked shack standing alone on the top of the world and gulped with fear:
“This my home all summer? And this is summer?”
The inside of the shack was even more miserable, damp and dirty, leftover groceries and magazines torn to shreds by rats and mice, the floor muddy, the windows impenetrable.— But hardy Old Andy who’d been through this kind of thing all his life got a roaring fire crackling in the potbelly stove and had me lay out a pot of water with almost half a can of coffee in it saying “Coffee aint no good ‘less it’s strong!” and pretty soon the coffee was boiling a nice brown aromatic foam and we got our cups out and drank deep.—
Meanwhile I’d gone out on the roof with Marty and removed the bucket from the chimney and put up the weather pole with the anemometer and done a few other chores—when we came back in Andy was frying Spam and eggs in a huge pan and it was almost like a party.— Outside, the patient animals chomped on their supper bags and were glad to rest by the old corral fence built of logs by some Desolation lookout of the Thirties.
Darkness came, incomprehensible.
In the gray morning after they’d slept in sleeping bags on the floor and I on the only bunk in my mummy bag, Andy and Marty left, laughing, saying, “Well, whatayou think now hey? We been here twelve hours and you still aint been able to see more than twelve feet!”
“By gosh that’s right, what am I going to do for watching fires?”
“Dont worry boy, these clouds’ll roll away and you’ll be able to see a hunnerd miles in every direction.”
I didn’t believe it and I felt miserable and spent the day trying to clean up the shack or pacing twenty careful feet each way in my “yard” (the ends of which appeared to be sheer drops into silent gorges), and I went to bed early.— About bedtime I saw my first star, briefly, then giant phantom clouds billowed all around me and the star was gone.— But in that instant I thought I’d seen a mile-down maw of grayblack lake where Andy and Marty were back in the Forest Service boat which had met them at noon.
In the middle of the night I woke up suddenly and my hair was standing on end—I saw a huge black shadow in my window.— Then I saw that it had a star above it, and realized that this was Mt. Hozomeen (8080 feet) looking in my window from miles away near Canada.— I got up from the forlorn bunk with the mice scattering underneath and went outside and gasped to see black mountain shapes gianting all around, and not only that but the billowing curtains of the northern lights shifting behind the clouds.— It was a little too much for a city boy—the fear that the Abominable Snowman might be breathing behind me in the dark sent me back to bed where I buried my head inside my sleeping bag.—
But in the morning—Sunday, July sixth—I was amazed and overjoyed to see a clear blue sunny sky and down below, like a radiant pure snow sea, the clouds making a marshmallow cover for all the world and all t
he lake while I abided in warm sunshine among hundreds of miles of snow-white peaks.— I brewed coffee and sang and drank a cup on my drowsy warm doorstep.
At noon the clouds vanished and the lake appeared below, beautiful beyond belief, a perfect blue pool twenty five miles long and more, and the creeks like toy creeks and the timber green and fresh everywhere below and even the joyous little unfolding liquid tracks of vacationists’ fishingboats on the lake and in the lagoons.— A perfect afternoon of sun, and behind the shack I discovered a snowfield big enough to provide me with buckets of cold water till late September.
My job was to watch for fires. One night a terrific lightning storm made a dry run across the Mt. Baker National Forest without any rainfall.— When I saw that ominous black cloud flashing wrathfully toward me I shut off the radio and laid the aerial on the ground and waited for the worst.— Hiss! hiss! said the wind, bringing dust and lightning nearer.— Tick! said the lightning rod, receiving a strand of electricity from a strike on nearby Skagit Peak.— Hiss! tick! and in my bed I felt the earth move.— Fifteen miles to the south, just east of Ruby Peak and somewhere near Panther Creek, a large fire raged, a huge orange spot.— At ten o’clock lightning hit it again and it flared up dangerously.—
I was supposed to note the general area of lightning strikes.— By midnight I’d been staring so intently out the dark window I got hallucinations of fires everywhere, three of them right in Lightning Creek, phosphorescent orange verticals of ghost fire that seemed to come and go.
In the morning, there at 177° 16´ where I’d seen the big fire was a strange brown patch in the snowy rock showing where the fire had raged and sputtered out in the all-night rain that followed the lightning. But the result of this storm was disastrous fifteen miles away at McAllister Creek where a great blaze had outlasted the rain and exploded the following afternoon in a cloud that could be seen from Seattle. I felt sorry for the fellows who had to fight these fires, the smokejumpers who parachuted down on them out of planes and the trail crews who hiked to them, climbing and scrambling over slippery rocks and scree slopes, arriving sweaty and exhausted only to face the wall of heat when they got there. As a lookout I had it pretty easy and only had to concentrate on reporting the exact location (by instrument findings) of every blaze I detected.