The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  Sometimes I would sit atop one of the city’s many hills, and stare out at the sea to the west, and the immense bay to the east, and the wild seethe of inlet between them, and consider that here was a city shaped like the dreams of its residents, so many of whom wanted to be here at the end of the earth, the edge of the continent, the final mile of their voluminous country; here those who wished to live at the edge of all things did so, on a craggy peninsula that was both remote and the destination of ships and souls and stories from all over the world; another thing to love about San Francisco was that there were a hundred languages in its streets and lanes, and a man could easily walk in and out of a dozen tongues as he walked from one dock to another; being greeted here in Mandarin, and there in Mexican, and around the corner in Russian, before he arrives at his house, to be greeted in Gaelic or Greek by his neighbors, and finally in American by the housemaid, herself from Finland and proud of her command of the native lingo.

  * * *

  But I have forgotten to give you the smells of the city! So then, here is an inexhaustive list, drawn from my memory as I walked and gamboled and strolled here and there, eyes and ears open, absorbing the scent of the city in every pore.

  Walk with me up Bush Street—uphill, I think, as we are fresh in the legs and the wind is at our backs. Up past Powell and Mason and Taylor, surely named for burly merchants or military men, or both at once, as is the American way; behind us the bells of Notre Dame des Victoires, a French Catholic church—the Marists, fine men with whom I have sipped many a glass; the best priests, in my opinion, appreciate the finer things in life, and do not shrink from that which the Creator has made, or allowed us to make from His largesse, like the swirling poetry of wine, and the meditative pleasure of tobacco.

  Past Jones Street, where we pause for a cornucopia of scents: the faint wet burnt smell of laundry, the alluring aroma of coffee somewhere down on Sixth or Pine, the steady underlayer of coal fires burning to heat this drafty breezy city; the piercing smell of wood smoke and split wood, and perhaps ever so faintly the scent of the oils used to clean and preserve axes and hatchets and wood-wedges; the thorough smell of horse manure and hay and straw and horse sweat, and the drifting acrid scent of steam engines; a whiff of the beer and ale most residents drink every evening, even the younger ones—I have seen boys of twelve manfully quaffing their beer down at the docks, after a long day unloading boats and ships.

  Past Leavenworth, Hyde, and Larkin, and now our legs are straining a little—it surely is a city of steeps and slopes, pitches and precipices, though I give no credence to stories of small dogs and toddlers slipping on Polk and rolling all the way down Bush into the bay; they would have slowed down sufficiently after ten or twelve blocks of hurtling along, so that a policeman or an enterprising preacher could have snatched them up; such legends are not to be countenanced, though occasionally I have seen carts and barrels hurtling down the street on their own, either lost by their owners, or breaking out at long last in coveted independence. It is that sort of country, where all things desire to be governed just a little, if at all; never was there a country like these United States, where independence is the common cry, dependence is the communal glue, and some sort of grudging interindependence a possible future; the whole nation is a kind of cheerful violent experiment in just how lightly the reins of government can lie upon the body of a people, without the commonality pulling apart in pockets of shrill rage and chaos. There are no robed kings and bewigged courts here, as the Americans are very fond of telling you, though they do have kings of their own kind, in lush offices and armed citadels, the former who dictate their will to underlings and shiver the markets at will, and the latter who obliterate the aboriginals, having no other enemy on which to exercise their armies.

  Polk, Franklin, Gough—now we are along the spine of the city, as it were, and from our feet the west declines to the sea, the east to the bay. Again we pause to smell the wonderful symphony or cacophony of scents: the irresistible hint of ocean and sea-wrack and tide flat, the sharp pungency of pine and cypress and madrone, the tendrils of scent trailing after railroads and meat-packing and sugar-refining, even, perhaps, very faintly, an iota of cigar smoke, from the cheroots that every man and boy in San Francisco appears to burn from dawn to dusk. If we are fanciful we can say that we apprehend hints of opium and lust, which are sold freely in the streets, and certainly not just in Chinatown; and if we are more fanciful still we could say that we ascertain the slightest scents of the mounds of fish and produce that pour into the city every day, to be packaged and shipped right back out again in every direction. And do we smell the clink and sheen of money, the urge to power, the moans of the poor women who are prisoners to prostitution, the groans of the poor Asiatics who work the most and earn the least? Perhaps we do, perhaps we do; can it be so impossible to live and work and walk in a city of this size and bustle, and not see and smell and hear pain and despair, as well as thriving joy? You would be blind and deaf not to notice how a city is built upon the exhausted bodies of half its people; and this is true of all cities through history, from ancient Alexandria to tomorrow’s Areopolis; even the cities we will someday compose in the sky will be built by poor strangers from another planet altogether, perhaps—themselves confined at night to their squalid ghetto, as always was and always will be. Will we never be free of the urge to rank and to reign, to fawn at those above and sneer at those below?

  * * *

  Mrs Carson being away for a few days on a personal matter, the kitchen duties fell to Mr Carson, who accomplished them by the simple expedient of roasting deer meat over a fire, accompanied by pots of coffee; suitable fare for men in the wilderness, as Mr Carson said, which is where we were without the compass of Mrs Carson’s shining presence to set us aright. The other residents in the house at that time being men of various burly occupations, used to rough fare and dense coffee, there was a convivial feeling in the kitchen, as if we were all a ship’s crew, or a gang of timber-fallers, pleased to sit and eat by the fire at the end of a hard day, and tell stories of good times and bad.

  Those few days I remember well for the sheer variety of stories, for the men in the house that winter were a wonderfully diverse lot, not only by their labor but by nationality, personality, and percentage of garrulity; one fellow from Russia was the most amiably verbose man I think I ever heard, a round sailor with an endless parade of tales from his years as a mariner, both with his country’s navy and as an “agent of fortune,” as he said; another man, from Ireland where all men are said to be natural raconteurs, was as lean and taciturn as the Russian was not; and of course, such being the way of the world, these two were the best of friends, and had shipped together for years in freighters and tramp steamers throughout the Pacific. As the Russian said cheerfully he did all the talking for the both of them during the year, except on the fourth day of March every year, which was Robert Emmet’s birthday, when their agreement was that the Russian would strive to fast from words for a day, and the Irishman would speak freely, if not exactly at length, in honor of a great man among his countrymen, who only wanted freedom of thought and speech and judgment and religion for all, and strove incredibly to make a rebellion without shedding the blood even of the oppressor.

  “He was captured by the imperialist soldiers only because he would not flee abroad without saying farewell to his beloved Sarah Curran,” said the Russian, “and he was falsely tried by an imperial power who coldly bought off his cowardly lawyer, and they hung him, yes they did, right in the streets of his own beloved city, and then they cut off his head for good measure, being afraid of his ideas even after they killed him dead. But though his mortal remains be dust and wind today, his voice lives on and always will in Ireland, for every man, woman, and child, and verily the creatures of the earth and air and water there, know his last words, and can repeat them in a trice, so that they elevate and strengthen the hearts of those who would be free of their yoke. ‘I acted as an Irishman, determined on deliv
ering my country from the yoke of a foreign and unrelenting tyranny,’ he said, staring up at the grim and furious judge. ‘I wished to prove that Irishmen were indignant at slavery, and ready to assert the independence and liberty of their country. I am going to my cold and silent grave; my lamp of life is nearly extinguished; my race is run; the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. But let no man write my epitaph. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.’”

  We all sat silent for a moment, all seven or eight of us at table, and then the Russian turned to the Irishman and asked had he said it right, had he remembered it aright? But his friend had his head bowed down to his chest, and every one of us could see the sheen of tears on his face. Another silent moment passed and then John Carson rose and placed his hand on the man’s shoulder. We all arose and did so also, some men very tenderly. It is a canard that rough men are rough all through; my experience is that very many men are like trees, rough-barked but clean and strong and true beneath exteriors shaped by hard weather.

  7

  THAT NIGHT, SITTING BY THE FIRE in the parlor, John Carson was, I believe, still moved by the Irishman’s tears, for he told me a story that he said he had never told anyone, other than Mrs Carson, and never thought he would tell anyone, other than Mrs Carson, “to whom,” he said, “I have told and will tell every fiber of my being, every iota of thought, every yearning and darkness in my heart, for as long as she will have me so forthright and unadorned, and still find some affection for me, though I be as honest as any man can be; for I will not hide anything at all from that woman. It would be a sin to be anything but naked in spirit with her, and hope that she still will love you despite her intimate knowledge, which might well turn another lover away. I am no heroic figure, but a man like any other, capable of selfish and selfless at once, of light and dark, courage and cravenness; all men are two men, always at war with each other, isn’t that so? We don masks, we perform parts, we adopt personas, but we are never one sort of man, and not another. Even the greatest among us knows this to be so; perhaps the wisest among us are those who admit it most easily. We have two arms, two legs, two ears, two eyes, two of most parts; why would we not have two sides to our characters, always wrestling with each other? A life is one thing we can see, a long grapple with love and money and pain and grace; but the other thing—the interior grapple—we do not see, though it be the wilder war; and what we account as character is not so much an achievement as it is a victory of the moment, the hour, the day. So even a paragon like Lincoln, or Grant, or my friend Mr Twain, or your countryman David Hume—by all accounts as great a man personally as intellectually—must grapple with his dark side, his lesser self, the greedy goblin inside every man. We wrestle in private, and beam in public; but you and I know that every man has two faces, and must strive all his days to be a better man than he knows he is.”

  I was startled to hear this phrased so well, for I had myself many times pondered exactly this, that every man was two men, and I had idly thought someday to try to write it out—indeed I had twice started a story on the theme, to no avail, and at the cost of a great deal of paper tossed into the fire. Although the failed efforts had been educational; the more I set myself to be an author, the more I realized that some stories would only allow themselves to be told in certain ways, and would not subject themselves to my command as to their shape and form and pace. I could only hope that they would impatiently await my further learning, and present themselves again when I had grown sufficiently in skill to unfurl them properly at last.

  * * *

  “I sat on that bench over the harbor in Sydney for a long time,” said Mr Carson, “a long time—thinking about that interesting young man, and what he had said, and what he had seen in me, and spoken aloud; I had known it too, down in the innermost chambers of my heart, but had not allowed myself to admit and articulate it—who knows why? There are times that I think all the stories we tell of human beings are finally stories of making our way through the wilderness of ourselves, not through the wild world around us. So many tales of adventure and voyage and journey are finally stories of a subtle change inside a person, with the tumultuous passage of the body over mountain and desert and sea only an excuse, a drapery, a costume on something else altogether. Indeed sometimes I think everything that we do is some sort of theater; perhaps we need the aura of performance as a screen between us and naked feeling, so that we can sip it rather than be drowned by it. But you are the author, Mr Stevenson, and better able to come at such things with sentences; I am merely a maritime man, at work on the skin of the oldest story of all, the first story, the story from which all other stories come.

  “I can say that my life changed direction on that bench, as if the bench was a boat, and when I sat down I was headed in one direction, and when I arose I was sailing on wholly another tack; I think I can say that fair. But before I could go in my new direction I had one last task in Australia, and that was to fulfill a promise I had made to a friend.

  “This was a man called David, with whom I had shipped several times, a man I admired very much for his forthright honesty and gentle humor, his unswerving courage, and his remarkable ability to gather men together for a cause; I suppose that sort of man is often a leader in political or military or commercial arenas, but David had no ambition that way at all, and not because he was a brown man, an aboriginal man—ab origine, there from the beginning—but because he had no interest in gain, in the way that we usually measure it. His was the ambition of a moment and then another, is the best I can explain it. In our case, as shipmates, I saw him again and again take command of a crew not by rank or violence, but by the quality of his character; and each time this happened we were a much better crew, much more effective in our work, because we were pleased to be together, do you know what I mean? And that was his ambition, I believe—to solicit that from the people he met. He bound us together not in common awe of him but in a shy respect for what was best in ourselves—a thing that had not been called out of many men, before they shipped with David.

  “His true name was not David, as I discovered. He had been born in a place called Gimuy, for the blue fig trees there, and he had been named Gurumarra, or dry lightning—a remarkably apt name, I should say, for the sudden flash of his ideas and his humor was exactly like the flicker of lightning on a day with no rain or thunder—illuminations arriving and leaving so quickly that you doubted your eyes and ears. He grew up by the sea and was entranced by it early, and set forth into it on boats as soon as he could. I had the sense from what he told me that his people were disappointed that he went to sea as a profession, as they thought him destined for some soaring achievement, but he never explained that aspect of his life. I can well imagine that he would have been a military visionary of surpassing skill had he bent his energies that way, and from what I understand of Queensland, the wars between residents and immigrants were more continuous and savage there than anywhere else on the continent. But I can better imagine that they thought him called to be a spiritual or national leader of rare power and energy—far more than a renowned shaman, and maybe something like a savior, the man to lead them out of tumult and into the country of peace. His gifts were all that way, and an author like you, Mr Stevenson, could write a hundred books of how his life there, had he stayed in the land of the blue fig tree, might have turned history in another direction altogether. I sometimes think of this myself, on days when the wind is from the southeast, and I fancy there is the rich tang of fig trees in the air; but maybe that scent is from one of our own hills, and not from the beaches where Gurumarra played as a child.

  “Well, he died at sea, of course, as many of us do. I was there when it happened, and saw him vanish into the sea myself, never to be seen again, and perhaps someday I will tell you that story, for even his death was remarkable, and not a man who was there will ever forget it; occasionally I come across a shipmate from tho
se crews, and the first and only thing we talk about is Gurumarra—I suppose in a sense he is still gathering us together, for every mate of mine from that time has changed the tack of his sails, and steers by the stars Gurumarra unveiled to him. The fact is, Mr Stevenson, that Gurumarra was a great man, whom the world did not, and does not, and will not know—but we who sailed with him know, and will not forget. A man’s life, if he is lucky, creates a ripple in many other lives, and maybe that ripple grows and becomes a tidal wave; maybe.

  “In the way of very good friends Gurumarra and I had sworn a vow together, that if death came for one, the other would care for his effects, and deliver his most precious things and messages to certain people. In large part to accomplish this I had shipped to Australia myself, though there were other reasons to sign with that particular ship and captain. In Sydney I had been paid off, and was for the moment solvent, with no lack of ships to join after I had fulfilled my vow. So when I arose from that bench, it was to find my way north to one particular beach, and there to deliver certain possessions and messages to Gurumarra’s people.

  “A long journey that was—up the coast, mostly, although here and there I wound my way inland, through long sunlit valleys and thick forests of gum and ironbark. I saw animals carved into rocks in remote mountains and caves—ancient lions, and kangaroos twice the height of a man; I fished and swam in many a hidden bay where I seemed utterly alone, although perhaps there were always watchers in the hills; I walked and rode wagons through dense wet forests and along quiet trickling rivers. I stood on hills and saw whales and tremendous turtles in the sea below me. The land was bright and brooding and wet and dry all at once; sometimes there would be storms of such voluminous rain that I would have to huddle in a cave or on a hotel porch for hours, and then make my way through mud fully a foot deep. Many people were friendly and helpful, a few remote and threatening, one or two actually dangerous; but I finally arrived in the town called Cairns, and delivered a box and two messages to Gurumarra’s people, and a third message, to a boy of about ten years old.