Having Everything Right (8 page)

At the peak of the ridge again, under a fir I spread my armload of fern, then leaned branches from a windfall against each other to make a roof. Crooked sticks were best for this. They were strong two ways at once.

In the thin grass at the hilltop was a bronze survey-marker, a ring of numbers and words too dark to read. Four fallen fence-posts and a tangled strand of wire. I sat down. The sun had gone but the sky was bright. I would be warm for a time; a mosquito came singing.

With the first stars came the light-points of eight fishing boats far below on the flat Pacific. Some were anchored still; others wandered across the darkness. There in the sky above rambled the round constellation of the tick, its eight arms glimmering; there the starlight cluster of the fawn's bones. There among stars the vacant sack of the swallow's nest. There the alert triangle of the deer's head, listening. Slowly, the deer's face slid to the horizon; it became a curve, a seal diving without a word. A star fell burning across the west. The wind began to touch me with cold.

I turned toward my shelter of branches. Far to the east, too far for sound, above the distant light of a farm a human flare burned sudden in the sky, scattering out in fragments as it flashed and went dark. In both worlds, a disintegration by fire. Because I was awake with hunger and vulnerable with cold, I was afraid.

My body had four sides. The side toward earth was warm. I lay on my back this time in the seventh turning. The crushed fern was soft, the wind cold. Moon was moving west, toward water, where it would make a path. Later, maybe, there would be an owl calling.

If I had rounded a stone with my hands, I would hold it now. The stone would not be mine, but its shape would belong in my hands. The stone would be cold as I was—not quite cold enough to shake. I was still; it was the tree that moved. An owl did call. I was not shaking yet. I had four sides, and one was warm. If I began to shake, I would turn partway. The seasons pass to keep the Earth alive. The owl was calling for this. I was cold now. Even the tree was still.

Something touched the earth—I felt it. Down the slope two deer were feeding; the darker clusters of their bodies moved against moonlit grass. I lay back. The sky. The tree. The owl calling. Something comes to one alone, not a song like honey is sweet. A song like water. I was cold and had not eaten; this was a part of it. How does the tree stand, even after it has died? We both lived. The moon was there; a moth flew toward it. The owl made a sound. A song is given in the place one lives. Even the tick, wordless with desire, knew this. The tree has a way, a secret way. Sometimes another may hear it. The seal dives to find out. I was cold; I was spared the fullness of it, knowing then my own. Something came to me shapeless. Then it had a shape and I belonged.

When I had turned twenty-eight times, the fern grew thin and the darkness softened. These ways are nocturnal: the full blossoming of
stars; a pilgrim's true solitude. As light came on, a clarity retreated from the world. A small bird was telling what it knew.

By the time I had picked my way downslope for an hour, the sun came to me and I was warm again, so filled with waking I felt no hunger. When I would eat, sometime soon, the precision to my witness of the earth would dwindle, as the tones of darkness dwindle at first light and are hard to remember. I lived on hunger for the time, and all forms lived with me—dew on the bay leaf swiveling from its twig, the vines of poison oak braided by light on a trunk of fir.

I came to a stream, then to the road. I saw the car at a great distance, a white glint of modern time. Beyond it, the waves came silently. I perched on a boulder broken from the road-cut. Soon I would balance on one foot beside the car and shed my clothes—the ones with poison oak brushed into them—and stand naked a moment. I would be cold. Then I would dress and it would go away.

Rain was driving in toward land, but where I stood was still. If this were a story, no rainbow could hang clean and various over the road; but this was my life, and the arc of the storm was there.

T
HE
S
EPARATE
H
EARTH

After school I stopped at home to change my outfit—shucking my slacks for jeans, tossing aside my polite cotton shirt for the buckskin one my grandmother had sewn, pulling on my boots—and lit out for The Woods on the run. We called it
The Woods
, just as we called a nearby slope
The Big Hill;
the limited territory of childhood is exact, and therefore mythic. Two blocks from home the human world dwindled to a path threading through nettle and alder. A spider web across the path meant no one was there before me. I crawled under its fragile gate to solitude and was gone.

This was my routine from third grade to high school—to straggle home after dark and stand in the cold garage, shivering and balancing on one foot to shed my muddy clothes. It was a certain evening in my
junior year that I realized with a shock I could walk directly into the kitchen; I had somehow not fallen—or leapt—into the creek, had not slithered up a mossy tree, hugging the trunk with my thighs and arms, or spilled down a bank of mud. I had politely walked in the woods and returned. I mistrusted my sincerity. Something had changed. Something had gone wrong.

“What did you find today?” my grandmother (we called her Boppums) would ask, as she sat picking at a crust of cockle-burs in one of my socks. I would run to my mud-stiffened pants to dig through the pockets for a rock an Indian might have used, or a leaf I liked, crumpled and fragrant, or a waterlogged stick turning into a fossil, a furry length of twine I had braided from cedar bark.

“I could use this to snare a rabbit, if I had to.”

The Woods was a wild tract developers had somehow missed in their swathe through old Oregon. It probably stretched about three miles long by two miles wide, and was surrounded by the city of Portland and its suburbs. Raccoon, beaver, salmon, deer, awesome pileated woodpeckers, and exotic newts were among the secret lives of the place. Once, in the fifth grade, four of us decided to head north through unexplored territory toward the edge of the world. Lewis and Clark had nothing on us, on our glorious bewilderment when we emerged, near dark of a long Saturday, to find a broad, dangerous road, a tall house covered with ivy, and a giant in blue coveralls mowing his lawn.

“Where are we?” Bobby Elliott shouted over the roar of the motor.

The man looked down at a row of muddy, scratched little savages. “Terwilliger Extension,” he shouted. We were stunned to silence by this bizarre name for most of the long detour home, past the ice-cream store.

What
did
we do down there all those hours multiplied by weeks and years? When we went together, we often hatched a project—more like Robinson Crusoe than John Muir in our use of the wilderness:

“Let's find the charcoal-wagon boy's old road!”

“Let's find Indian relics!”

“Let's
make
Indian relics!”

“Let's go to the Old Mill and make a fort!”

“Let's wade as far as we can without stepping out of the creek—so no one can track us!”

“Let's roast a skunk cabbage root and try to eat it!”

“Let's make a path with steps in the hill and signs so an eighty-year-old woman could follow it!”

“Let's make elderberry pipes and smoke leaves!”

“Let's steal those real estate signs and hide them!”

Although our research into history, botany, anthropology, and geography almost got us poisoned or arrested on several occasions, we lived by joy. Once we ate a kind of wild carrot, then came home to look it up in Pat O'Shea's father's medical text. The only plant we could find of similar description was called
hemlock
: “A piece of the root the size of a walnut can kill a cow.” I never read a sentence in school that had such impact. The dizzying image of a stricken cow lurching heavily to its knees will inhabit my brain whenever I am about to taste a new food. That time, we were spared.

When I went to The Woods alone, my experience was shaped by a book Boppums had given me, Theodora Kroeber's
Ishi in Two Worlds
. It told the story of “The Concealment,” a last cluster of five Yahi Indians in northern California living in the mountains at a place they called
wowunopo
, “the grizzly bear's hiding place,” and finally of Ishi himself, alone in an empty world. Like Ishi, I was the last man, the only man of a lost tribe. I too had a small, sacred geography hidden even from my friends. If America ended, I would be there in my shelter of boughs. A huge tree had fallen, and where the root-mass tore out from the earth a hollow was left that no one could see, roofed over with the arched limbs of fir, woven by my hands with sword fern and moss, with leaf litter,
until the roof became a knob of the earth itself. Like Ishi, I approached by a different way each time, so as not to wear a path others might see, and I covered the entrance to my den with boughs broken, not cut in a human way.

Inside, I would kindle a fire—only along toward dark so the smoke could not be seen—and be utterly alone with it, staring into the flame, nudging twigs together as they crumbled into ash, then letting it die and stumbling home along the ways I had memorized, to shed my clothes in the garage, to find my dinner in the oven and the family dispersed for the evening around the house.

My apocalyptic fantasy was nourished by the Cold War that filled the time—the air-raid drills in grade school, the evasive answers by adults, their troubled looks and few words about the greatest terrors of our world. In seventh grade we cornered our history teacher in the hall and demanded, “Will the bomb fall?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“If I thought it would, I couldn't live my life.”

Why did Boppums encourage my life in the woods that harvested so many cockleburs? She was a small, genteel woman, a minister's widow who stood humming at the ironing board while she watched a black and white
Edge of Night
on our tiny television. As a young bride, she had spent a desperate season trying to homestead in Wyoming, and she had few illusions about the glories of primitive life. Yet she had sewn this elaborately fringed buckskin shirt for me, and had given me my own bible of the primitive,
Ishi
, which taught me to be separate among my countrymen and distinct from my kindest friends, about wilderness skills and beliefs, about a kind of existential fortitude that could keep one alive when the universe is wrenched awry and all people die. What was her lesson for me?

I learned a lot in the kitchen, working with my mother and with Boppums around the stove. I called myself my mother's company-boy, the one who would be there to stir, or crack an egg, or knead, grease the pan, lick the beater, help wash up. I loved to pour the oil into the batter; then I could see down into the secret center through the amber window it made. And I loved to open the oven to slide a toothpick into brown bread, my face hot, lungs filled with a nourishing fragrance of steam. This was the hearth where the family would gather when the bread was done to cut the first crust away, butter it, divide it. There were many lessons beyond the recipe.

Once when I came home from The Woods my mother stared hard at my face. “What happened to you? You look different! Your eyelashes are gone!”

I had to admit they were. I explained that I had begun to build my fire, but it wouldn't catch. As I knelt over the tinder to blow, it suddenly flared about my face. My hair crackled in an acrid smoke, and my face felt like the sun, but I fell back unhurt.

My parents discussed the use of matches—both at this point, and later, when Van Dusenbery and I tied my sister to the tetherball pole and
pretended
to burn her at the stake. My parents decided I could continue to carry matches, if I would promise to be careful. I promised, both times.

But why were the matches, kept dry in a slim match-safe with a screw-cap in my pocket, such an essential part of my get-up that I dared not venture forth without them? Of course, there was my motto as a Boy Scout: Be Prepared. “For what?” one might ask. But that's not how the saying goes—just Be Prepared. Carrying matches, and a knife, and some string, and a book in case I got bored, and a dime, and a magnifying glass, a stub of hacksaw, a little measuring tape that rolled into itself, and other tools that made my pockets bulge was the way I lived. I sauntered so equipped to school, to The Woods, and even to the city
where I went for my clarinet lesson. I really needed a purse for it all, and I envied girls the amount of private stuff they could carry in the big handbags of the time. I finally made myself a bag from the waxy canvas covering of a war-surplus life preserver and trudged to school with it slung over my shoulder. Not fire, not a carving, but the ability to make fire, to cut, to tie things into a bundle—these were what Boppums and Ishi, and my parents, and my own sense of fear and mission in the world had taught me.

“If you are lost and have a knife,” my father said, “you can make anything you need. First whittle a figure-four to catch a rabbit; then from rabbit sinew, braid a bowstring, and carve your bow from a yew limb. Then with the bow catch a deer, and make a coat from the skin.
Then
you'll be snug.”

What a strange message to give a child. Now I remember that my father himself was alone like that during World War II—a conscientious objector isolated in a camp in northern California with other dissidents, fighting fires and planting trees in the very mountains Ishi roamed. My father felt the dangers, and the exhilaration of such isolation, and its required self-reliance. One time he was nearly hung by a mob made bold by wartime frenzy. And when the bomb fell, and the rest of America shouted and rang bells, he looked at his friends in confusion. And my mother, with her beautiful smile and her one good hand—did she feel alone in the world, for all her grace and articulate success? And Boppums, her mother, who gave me the book that somehow told our story? Did they, together, silently, teach me to be Ishi, to be a pacifist Hansel with no crumbs, to be a monkish “soldier of the cross,” to be a bear boy gone far from others to live alone and discover from scratch what being a true spirit in a wild place might mean?

In the woods by myself, fire was the heart of it all. In my secret den, or in some refuge off the trail—in The Moss Forest, on The Island,
beside The Stockade, on the sand beside The Second Creek, or near The Spring—I would seek out the low, shade-killed twigs of a hemlock tree, and the ritual of isolation and sufficiency would begin. I would hold a broken branch to my lips to see how dry it was. The lips, not the fingers, could tell. I would lay a ring of stones dug into mineral soil and arrange perfect sticks one over the other. I would slip out one match from the gleaming steel safe in my pocket, peel off the paraffin cap from its head with my thumbnail, and shield the hearth with my body from the wind—this the repeated prelude to my identity. When the match burst open in my cupped hands, and the flame climbed obediently through the precise architecture of my kindling, I had made, again, my own portable world in the world. The small fire talked, it warmed, it required care and responded well, it made me smell smoky and wild, and as evening darkened around us its coals were the small landscape of my thought.

Here was my private version of civilization, my separate hearth. Back home, there were other versions of this. I would take any refuge from the thoroughfare of plain living—the doll-house, the treehouse, the hidden room under the stairs, the closet, tunnels through furniture, the tablecloth tent, the attic, the bower in the cedar tree. I would take any platform or den that got me above, under, or around the corner from the everyday. There I pledged allegiance to what I knew, as opposed to what was common. My parents' house itself was a privacy from the street, from the nation, from the rain. But I did not make that house, or find it, or earn it with my own money. It was given to me. My separate hearth had to be invented by me, kindled, sustained, and held secret by my own soul as a rehearsal for departure.

Is this a necessity for education—that each child must have some kind of separate hearth, some separate fire to kindle in secret? My friends had their own small worlds I knew a little about. They would spend their private hours under the hood of a car, or between
earphones of the Grateful Dead. To make a dead car speak is akin to the miracles we are asked to perform in adult life. To kindle pleasure in a lover's body, to kindle a vision in the mind through drugs—these were the forbidden ways some chose. For each of my friends, the separate hearth might be alcohol, religion, TV, crime. Theft and vandalism were ways of knowing and proving. Most went out on some kind of vision-quest in those days. Some didn't come back clear. But some never went at all, and these were the ones who obeyed only voices from outside themselves.

The world did end. My friends died, or changed, sold out, moved away. They became their parents or hurt their parents. Today my own clothes are clean. I walk in through the front door and leave no tracks. My pockets are flat. I carry money and a comb. I carry a driver's license with my picture on it. I don't carry matches to my clarinet lesson. I don't even play the clarinet. So what did Boppums teach? What did the fire teach? What is Ishi to me now, and how am I made ready by my years at the hearth hidden in the dark woods?