In his second winter in the woods, my friend got chilblains and a toenail fungus. I brought him a half-dozen pairs of fresh socks, a bottle of Benadryl, new felt-lined pac boots, and a vial of anti-fungal cream. Bearing these interventions on a day of deep snow, I found him with his hair cut down to the nubs; his scalp itched, and he’d thought a close clipping might help. Did he have ringworm? I wasn’t sure, looking at the little bald patches and red, irritated areas on his skull, but since it couldn’t hurt, I suggested he try some of the anti-fungal cream I’d brought for his toenails. I had it in me to play doctor, I guess, though my aptitude was limited to pulling splinters and delivering specious diagnoses, two services I provided to John William. He benefited also from my pharmaceutical-supply service, which included codeine, ibuprofen, cortisone, some amoxicillin I’d been prescribed for an infection but didn’t use, dandruff shampoo, mercurochrome, and psilocybin.
That’s right—we tripped up there. Psilocybin mushrooms are so ubiquitous in Seattle that you can pluck them from the grass in the shade of trees at Ravenna Park, for example. Roosevelt students used to do exactly that, and probably still do. We could be deliriously stoned and still ID ’shrooms because of the way their stems turned definitively blue about a minute after they were picked. It was best to be selective and take the richly hued ones with veils breaking loose if you wanted a potent trip. Psilocybin not only froze well in baggies, it was also prized as a trade commodity by users too clueless to pick their own but flush with bud, coke, or hash. Do I sound like an expert? I am one. That old guy at the front of the class, pointing at the word “synecdoche” on the blackboard while wearing orthopedic Birkenstocks: you should probably suspect that he used to trip, because, no matter what he looks like today, he probably did.
John William’s mushroom trip was cousin to his acid nightmare. He got the shakes, got sick, turned green, and started panting, and then crawled into his sleeping bag and tried to ride it out by keeping his head covered and mumbling to himself. As for me, everything was funny. I’d try not to laugh at nothing, but it couldn’t be done. Later, I got deeply into the weave of my friend’s mats. Next, I put the ladder down and wandered through the forest, looking at trees. The long branches of the cedars with their voluptuous greens were the spirit of the Miss December who enjoyed hunting in a thong. I lay in moss, emitting foghorn notes. Creeped out by lichen where it hung like fake cobwebs, I wove my way through it in a delicate dance, thinking that made me invisible to spirits. Finally, I went back and checked on John William, first by poking him with a stick through his sleeping bag, then by manipulating his head from left to right and right to left while pulling on his beard. Feeling him move, I decided he wasn’t dead. Next, I mopped up his vomit with the remains of a sweater and flung it out of the cave. For a while, I sat with my knees up and my back against a wall, making those foghorn notes I’d made in the forest but with an interest now in the cave’s sonic architecture, its tomblike acoustics, listening to my reverb, and remembering the Roman catacombs I’d visited the summer I met Jamie. I’d been chanting for a while when John William said, between notes, “Please stop.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m dying, Neil.”
“You want water while you’re dying?”
“Just stop that weird noise.”
I got a canteen and put it by his head, but he didn’t drink, so I had to uncork the canteen, pull him upright by the beard, and pour water between his lips as best I could. A lot spilled. His face and hair got wet. When I dropped him again, I said, “Try to go with it or something.”
“Never again—they’re punishing me.”
“Right.”
“I’m seeing too clearly,” John William mumbled. “I don’t want to see this clearly.”
“Okay.”
“Jehovah,” he wept. “Jehovah’s got me.”
I DID MY STUDENT TEACHING at Garfield High (the Bulldogs), which I knew, mostly, as the school Hendrix never graduated from. For some reason, I was assigned to teach English as a Second Language to kids newly arrived from “Indochina,” even though I had no idea how to do this. On my first day, in a sweltering portable, I stood at the front of my class and, with ten fingers against my chest, said “Teacher,” and then wrote “teacher” on the board and repeated it, and next went up and down the rows making these kids point at me and say “Teacher,” and as they did I shook hands with each and looked each in the eye and smiled, thinking this was the right thing to do. As it turned out, all of them knew what “teacher” meant, not to mention a lot of other words, even whole sentences, and so they rightly felt what we were doing was a waste of time. I found out about this at the end of my third day as “teacher,” when a group of girls, maybe six or seven, pushed a student named Quyen in my direction and stood behind her, looking at the floor or peeking at me from behind Quyen’s shoulders, while Quyen said, as boldly as she could, “Mr. Countryman, you teach harder.”
One day, one of my students said, “Mr. Countryman, why bad scar on your hand?” and I told the class I’d made a blood pact when I was younger, and tried to describe a blood pact in simple language, the cutting of the palms and the mingling of blood, the solemnity surrounding this masochistic ritual, but it didn’t seem to me that the concept was understood, and the only comment I got from a student was “Dangerous—you get hepatitis.” After Thanksgiving, I decided that they should memorize poems and recite them in class, and that by this means we could work on the cadences of English and the subtleties of its American inflection, because these were sticking points for them. So as not to overwhelm anybody, I started with haiku, which, I had to explain, was a Japanese word, but that only caused new layers of confusion. Discombobulated, I tried to define scansion, but this was obviously completely off the subject and prompted Quyen to observe, using a word I hadn’t taught her, “You intellectual today, Mr. Countryman.” “Year after year / on the monkey’s face / a monkey face,” I said, getting deeper into scansion, but of course that left them more stumped. I gave up on haiku and tried hitting them with quatrains—“In Canada’s North / It is very cold / Eskimos go forth / But there is no mold”—before giving up on poems and turning instead to movies. We would watch a short scene three or four times in succession, from The Christmas Coal Mine Miracle or The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, and then I would hand out mimeographed scripts and, after pairing up students, force them to re-enact. Mimicry ensued.
One night, Jamie suggested Dick’s Drive-In in Wallingford for French fries and tartar sauce. We sat in the Datsun lobbing fries onto the hood for combative pigeons while listening to AM radio and watching the Dick’s crew, in white paper hats, orange company T-shirts, and grease-fouled aprons, work madly behind glass to meet the burger demand. In short: hamburger world. The parking lot smelled like a deep-fryer. It was summer, eleven-thirty on a Friday, and there were a lot of stoned teen-agers lined up at the windows. I went to get some extra napkins, and while I tried to work them free of their dispenser, a Sid Vicious look-alike leaned down and sideways, so as to be heard more clearly through the half-oval pass-through. Over a microphone, his order was succinctly repeated, and when he tipped his head in confirmation I heard, “Two chee fry Coke!” in a female voice, and then “Two chee fry Coke!” repeated by a male. I got in the car and told Jamie about this, that I thought “Two chee fry Coke!” was high comedy, and she said, while finishing her fries, “Guess what? I’m pregnant,” and wiped her fingers on my jeans.
Our funds were consolidated. We started going to open houses, learned real-estate lingo, took cards, but avoided agents. The search for the right home always left me with bad feelings. I would read the literature handed out at an open house and feel antagonized. “Quiet, woodsy setting.” “Spacious slate entry.” “Custom upgrades.” “Designer touches.” If we asked enough questions, a listing agent might say, looking us over as we stood in a foyer, “Do you think you qualify for financing?” Then, in the car, I would complain to Jamie—“Do you think y
ou qualify for financing? What’s with that?”—and we’d move on to the next house, me disdainfully, Jamie with either morning sickness or a yearning for fries. In this mode, we discovered our bungalow. “Bungalow” sounds Raj, or British Civil Service, like iced tea on the veranda while a Punjabi domestic in baggy white cotton waves a palm leaf and calls you “sahib.” Our bungalow, though, has horizontal siding and no frills. When we came on it in 1979, the sellers had recently added a ranch-house carport that was already so mildewed their agent wrote “Could easily be turned into a full garage” on the promotional circular. The house had been rehabbed in the mid-sixties with some “Colonial Revival” modifications, mainly a second floor and a gambrel roof, but still, in character, it remained a bungalow—that is, unadorned, maybe even homely. What made us buy such a motley excuse for architecture? We bought it because we could buy it outright with a little left over for property taxes, and because we fancied ourselves capable of converting this “promising fixer-upper” into something wonderful—or, as they say in home decorating, “It had good bones.” Plus, we were suckers. “Our” bungalow—it was ours before we bought it—had a modest veranda we thought of as charming. We could imagine sitting there in rocking chairs after dinner while passing the baby between us. It usually doesn’t take any more than that to sell a house. One matching myth and you’re ready for escrow. Everything else can be rationalized later. That’s what we did.
On the Wednesday morning after Labor Day in 1979, I walked out the door of our bungalow at seven, unlocked my new ten-speed from where it was cable-locked to a veranda support, and rode to school in my dress shoes and sweater vest with a hulking briefcase from Value Village strapped to the rat-trap by a bungee cord. Thirty minutes later, I took over Room 104 from a teacher named Janet West, an Elizabethan specialist who’d been good enough to leave behind her files, and who sent me postcards that fall—delivered to my teacher’s box—from Aruba, Reykjavík, and Ulan Bator, the capital of Outer Mongolia. On each she wrote, “Wish you were here,” followed by, successively, “Aspirin is our friend,” “Have you tried Scream Therapy?” and, finally, “Are we all happy in our chosen profession?”
I had to miss school on the day in April when our son was born, but other than that I never needed a substitute, and garnered a reputation as an eager beaver who started when the bell rang and wouldn’t allow bathroom trips. Someone would say, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and my answer would be, “I do, too,” and, without further ado, I’d return smugly to Melville. Then, one day, a girl shot back, “You don’t get it, C. I really have to go. It’s a girl thing,” and walked out. A few minutes later, a boy raised his hand and said, “C, I got this boy thing,” and walked out, too, and after that I decided not to have such a hard-and-fast policy about bathroom trips.
My second semester, I taught Modern English Literature, a class I’ve mentioned already. I was supposed to start with Hopkins and teach through Pinter, but there was some room, in between, for a few narrow choices—Sassoon or Owen, for example, or Kipling or Conrad, because there wasn’t time for both. My preference was for Conrad, but when I read the Kipling story in England in Literature—“The Miracle of Purun Bhagat”—I changed my thinking. A Brahmin of no small accomplishment and acclaim drops everything, takes up a begging bowl, and wanders into the Himalaya, where he inhabits a deserted shrine to the goddess Kali, who, a footnote in England in Literature explains, is “malignant…the black one, garlanded with skulls.” He’s fed corn, rice, red pepper, fish, bannocks, ginger, and honey by villagers, until he dies, cross-legged, with his back against a tree, and then these villagers build a temple and bring offerings, “but they do not know,” Kipling concludes, “that the saint of their worship is the late Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once prime minister of the progressive and enlightened state of Mohiniwala, and honorary or corresponding member of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do any good in this world or the next.”
Was this fair of me? I had my own reasons for choosing Kipling over Conrad, but no one knew this, and I could discuss “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” with my students as if our discussion was an exercise in literary history, instead of a veiled way for me to ask myself if John William made sense. I taught Kipling every year for two decades.
IN MY FIRST YEAR of teaching, I began making it my ritual to read, annually, the National Book Award winners in poetry and fiction. I also began bringing these books to class when I’d finished them, a “Death Mask of Shakespeare” bookplate in each, hopeful that students might borrow and return them if I left the books conspicuously displayed. My first year at this, I set two hardbacks in the chalk tray, wrote on the blackboard READ THESE BOOKS, and drew an arrow from those words to each title. They disappeared, and, despite the Death Mask of Shakespeare, I never saw them again. After that, I changed tactics and started buying used paperbacks, so many that Jamie had to get me, for my birthday, more bookplates, and these titles I kept in a conspicuous bookcase on the east wall of Room 104. Some came back, some didn’t, but either way I had an excuse for used-book-store browsing. If I went to the right shops and bought the right books, I could keep to my budget of $300 a year and buy about a hundred titles.
Nineteen-eighty: William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice in fiction and Philip Levine’s Ashes in poetry won National Book Awards, but, looking at the list, I couldn’t help noticing that the winner in Religion/Inspiration was Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels. I bought John William all three, but it was the Pagels, of course, that excited him. It was like I’d brought him the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Rosetta Stone. He dropped everything else and read it while I was there, and so I read something, too, and this was a pleasant interlude, I thought, like a kind of Sabbath, except that every once in a while John William would mar the peace by blurting out a sentence from Pagels, like “The creator caused his Mother to grieve by creating inferior beings, so she left him alone and withdrew into the upper regions of the heavens,” or “The world originated when Wisdom, the Mother of all beings, brought it forth out of her own suffering.” I’d nod at him and say, “That’s great,” or “Wow,” and then return to my own pages, but he didn’t get my message and started paraphrasing instead of quoting, which was lengthier and therefore worse. The next day, which we spent setting traps meant to catch small rodents, hauling wood into camp, and filling canteens, we were able to talk about other things by about the dinner hour, but when we were in our sleeping bags later that night, and all conversation had ceased, and I, for one, was moving toward sleep, John William, as if it was a bedtime prayer, broke the silence with “And Jesus said, ‘Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over all things.’”
“Great memorizing.”
“Shut up, Countryman.”
I turned toward him and said, “What if I don’t want to rule over all things? What if I don’t want to be troubled and then astonished? Why would I want to rule in the first place? What if I just want to sleep?”
John William said, “You’re already asleep.”
“That’s so deep,” I said, “O Your Royal Profoundness Swami Laurelhurst.”
“You’re sleepwalking through your life.”
“The problem with living in a cave is that you risk turning into a guru, and then no one likes you anymore.”
“The problem with living in hamburger world is that you risk turning into an idiot,” John William answered. “Didn’t you say you want to write books? You can’t do it with a cheeseburger in your hand.”
I said, “I disagree. The only way to do it is with a cheeseburger in your hand.”
“How many have you written?”
“I’d have a book by now if I wasn’t always bringing you toilet paper.”
“I never asked you to bring me toilet paper.”
“I bring it anyway.”
“Why is that?” John William said. “Why is it yo
u’re always bringing me toilet paper instead of writing the Great American Novel?”
“You tiresome ingrate.”
“‘Tiresome ingrate,’” said John William. “You’ve got a dainty vocabulary now. You’re ready for a cocktail party with ‘tiresome,’ Countryman. Your ‘tiresome’ is a nice touch. Touché.”
“All hail Lord Barry.”
I could hear John William scratching at his ringworm, or at whatever the problem was, in his scalp and behind his ears. “This is driving me nuts,” he announced.
“Use that stuff I brought.”
“I’m out.”
“I’ll get you more.”
To put it another way, I was like Purun Bhagat’s villagers with their corn, rice, red pepper, fish, bannocks, ginger, and honey. The Zen master could slap me across the face, and instead of leaving the monastery behind I’d fetch his rice with a terrible eagerness.
OVER THE YEARS, things changed. Parts of the trail were washed out by the river, and there was so much tree-fall every spring, when the water was too high for me to walk on the gravel bars, that the trip in became a bushwhack. I often scratched myself getting through with my expedition pack. Once, while struggling in a slash-filled ravine, I scared up a herd of elk, who crashed away so thunderously they scared me in return, because at first I thought they were an avalanche bearing down at just the moment when the rain forest had me throttled. On that same trip, I ran into three climbers with ten-day packs who were headed for the Valhallas. They were openly curious about a solo hiker with a load bigger than any of theirs but no rope or crampons, and I had to tell them that my plan was to waltz up Mount Tom and Hoh Peak, and from there to dabble with the possibility of penetrating northward to the Hoh’s main fork. In other words, I styled myself an inveterate bushwhacker as a means to explain my dearth of climbing equipment, and then sat around with this trio trading esoterica on the territory so as to seem legitimate. I don’t know if they were impressed, but I felt confident they were thrown off the scent of what was in fact a supply run. I was bringing food, soap, towels, socks, underwear, candles, and a host of cassettes from the Great Lectures Company with professors holding forth on particle physics, Victorian Britain, great battles of the ancient world, etc., so I made it a point not to open my pack while we sat by the river, these climbers and I, examining a map. John William, I should say, had by now a sizable cassette collection and an ample library, but he’d incinerated the Penthouses and Playboys I’d brought, because—he said—he didn’t want them “taking up space in my head.” I chided him for this. I described Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business and Maud Adams in Octopussy. “Countryman,” he said, “poontang’s the bait in Jehovah’s trap.”
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