November 13. My ride around Willapa Bay came in an oyster truck. When I told the driver I loved oysters, he said he hoped I like zinc. Why, I asked? “ ’Cuz the fishermen is turning up radioactive zinc in the oysters here,” he said. “They say it comes down the Columbia from Hanford and around the bay on the outflow plume.” One day I’d walked over the peninsula to the bay side and poached a few at low tide; they were great, roasted over my campfire with a few butter clams. “And I won’t eat sturgeon from the river no more,” the driver went on, “not with the paper mill pumping out chlorine.” Silly me, expecting this country to be wild and pristine, as the visitors’ guide says. Blazers on the beach, the big cedars mostly in absentia, glow-in-the-dark seafood. Roll on, Columbia.
November 20, Shi Shi Beach. The Olympic Park beaches may be sandy in summer, but in winter they go largely to pea gravel and cobbles. Most of the floats I find are shattered. Backpackers clamber over the driftwood piles like crabs, sometimes finding the whole ones before me. I feel I have a prior claim; their packs, after all, are full of food. I have found a sign saying “No Smoking” in Russian, and a pig’s heart (I think), as well as a coconut in its husk. I cooked its sweet meat with mussels plucked from the rocks—red tide should be over by now—and a large crayfish I caught in a back-beach pond, over a driftwood fire in a sprucy enclave, out of the rain.
Latter-day back-to-the-landers and poets have built huts by a glorious spot called Point of Arches, where horns and hoops of black basalt spill a mile out into the sea. They asked me to join them for the winter, but I declined. I don’t think their company would improve upon the ravens and the black bears that nose around my camp. And besides, I don’t believe anyone (since the Makah left long ago) should live here. Well, if the loggers don’t roust them out, the weather will. They’ve built in a gully and will surely be launched to sea during some big storm to come.
November 30. And so they were. And so was my tent. I am cold and wet through, though never too hungry in this land that made the Makah fat in winter. Not that I’ve got the dried salmon, gray whale blubber, and eulachon oil that stuck to their ribs during the winter ceremonials. But I’ve feasted on razor and horse clams, sea cucumber, a ruffed grouse I got with a lucky rock toss, and plenty of late evergreen huckleberries and cranberries. The none-too-adept hippies up in the ravine told me there was nothing here to eat. For the most part they seemed to subsist on canned goods and hot dogs, for which they made periodic trips out to the reservation store in Neah Bay.
But now, roofless to the elements, they’ve left, leaving their midden of old moldy sleeping bags and tin cans in the ruins of their campsite. I reckon I’ll be gone too, soon. Even if I waited out the winter without dying by drowning or pneumonia or sheer rot—it rains a hundred inches in winter here—I doubt there would be any butterflies to catch in this dense rainforest. Now, if my clients would buy unlimited quantities of these fine big banana slugs, or the purple urchins or lavender and orange sea stars that plaster the rocks offshore—if I could emulate Doc in Cannery Row, financing my beer and pickling fluid with the proceeds from harvesting the tide pools—then I’d be in business.
But no, my customers want butterflies. Even the Olympic Mountains won’t help, as they’re just about all in the national park, where amateurs (read: professionals without degrees, like me) cannot collect. Maybe it’s time to start heading for the Rockies. One of the beach survivalists shot a gull the other day and didn’t even try to eat it. I asked him why he did it. “Just practicin’ my survival skills, man,” is what he said. Easy riding, gull.
December 3. Slow hitching along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Passenger cars whizzed on by without a second look; can’t blame them. I probably wouldn’t pick me up. Fortunately, I had chestnut-backed chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets for company. Finally, a crabber gave me a lift and a couple of Dungeness crabs that I cooked in a driftwood fire at the eponymous Dungeness Spit. Then a bird-watcher took me down Hood Canal and all the way to Tacoma. I told him about the motorbiked murres, and he told me of an oil spill he’d recently been in on. “A murre with a broken neck would have been lucky,” he said. “We had dozens of them all gummed up in crude.” This was offshore. “We’re waiting for the big one in Puget Sound,” he told me, “with a governor who wants to let supertankers in. One of these days there’s going to be a really giant spill in one of the bays—Puget Sound, Barkley Sound, maybe up in Prince William Sound where they still have sea otters—and then we’ll see how oil and water mix.” If it’s down here, he told me, we can just about say goodbye to rhinoceros auklets, and marbled murrelets too—“even if they still have any big trees left to nest in.” He was verging on gloomy, so I bought him an Oly at the tavern near the Tacoma railyards where he dropped me off. We drank to the birds, the trees, Robinson Jeffers, and all the other sad misanthropes like ourselves.
December 5. Caught a freight east, but the bull kicked me off at Wishram—an old-time hobo junction outside a has-been railroad town deep inside the Columbia Gorge. Hoboes don’t like Dungeness crab, at least these didn’t, nor did they much like me. Anyway, I didn’t feel like waking up splayed, even if it had been warm enough to sleep, which it wasn’t with the infamous Gorge wind screaming through like just another train. It may have been an old-time ’bo camp, but these weren’t old-time ’boes. I’ve never known a genuine gentleman of the road to be unwelcoming around his fire. These guys were younger, harder—guys back from Vietnam with incredulous looks in their eyes, guys on drugs or wishing they were. I walked up the long grade to Highway 14 and tried the asphalt road instead. God bless that onion-truck driver! Now I sit in an all-night truck stop outside Walla Walla, a dusty dawn coming on. Will I ever get out of here, or will I become an onion grunt in the spring (as the driver suggested), planting Walla Walla sweets, maybe even sticking around to pull them up in the summer?
Waitress figures I’ll never get out of here. Gum-chewing siren in a coral uniform, she saw me writing and asked me what. “Just traveler’s tales,” I told her.
“Not romances?” she asked, clearly disappointed. When I convinced her I was no novelist, just a vagrant making chicken scratches while waiting for a ride, and no, I couldn’t write her life story for her, though I was sure it was every bit as fascinating and “weird” as she said, she told me I’d never get a ride. Coreen pouted for a while, but I was her only company, so she broke down and gave me another cup of coffee and a slice of peach pie, at the cost of also accepting a slice of her plenty-weird story. Then the morning trade began to butt in, demanding Coreen’s attention and aborting the saga, which I was quite enjoying, as it made my life sound easy. Why am I writing this crap? Just to stay awake.
December 13. I’ve read that Friday the 13th was a lucky day in the old religions, turned around by the latecomers, just like All Hallows’ itself. Anyway, the goblins smiled, and I landed from a ride with a rancher just outside Boise, Idaho. It’s a dreadful cold night, and any reasonable person might consider this bad fortune. But I recognized from the topography, at a spot way down the Snake this morning, the likelihood of a Nez Percé arrowhead manufactory. By midafternoon I had gathered 47 flint, chert, and obsidian points and some excellent shards. I traded a spearpoint with the manager of a motel for two nights’ lodging and four home-cooked meals. Tomorrow, I ought to make a week’s wages selling the points in Nampa, Boise, or Burley.
The manager, an amateur collector, told me he’s heard rumblings about new federal regulations that will ban the collecting of artifacts on public lands altogether. My first reaction, like his, was what the hell are so-called public lands for? But then, though I didn’t tell him this, I remembered feeling qualms about digging into that midden today. Seems a hard world where a ranch kid couldn’t pick up an arrowhead without being a crook. But maybe those times are going; maybe there won’t be any more ranch kids. Maybe there will be pothunters swarming all over the public lands, not just a few like me. And maybe such a law is inevitable. All I know is
it’s a bloody cold gale out there. The sage is struggling to keep its roots in the ground. Where would I be spending the night without those arrowheads? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
December 15. I made nearly twice what I expected, all from people who have spent their lives in the area and have never found a single point. “Where did you pick these up?” inquires a potential buyer. “Far from here, over by White Swan,” I lie. If he knew they were from his own backyard, he might not buy. Or else he’d say I stole them. But they don’t search. What’s the matter with people who never look beyond their own noses? Or is the matter with me, always a poke-about, sticking my snout here and there, in other people’s backyards and business, always in danger of freezing it off?
End of self-examination. I feel so flush, I might even catch a ’Hound to Jackson instead of hitchhiking across Antarctica. I hate to do it since that last lockout strike. Someday the drivers are really going to bite back. If labor even survives. Teamsters these days, they think Workers World is a theme park. Maybe that’s why an old leftie like me can’t get a job, or keep one . . . I’d rather scrabble for arrowheads in a frigid gale for a decent wage than sell my sore back to the man just to keep it warm a little longer.
Christmas Day. I had two options: spend Yule with the other derelicts in the mission at Pocatello, or drink beer with a Nez Percé/Shoshone friend on the reservation. Since his ancestors were the source of my current largesse, I chose the latter. When I arrived with a turkey and a case of Rainier Ale, my intentions were misunderstood. A tribal official asked if I thought they wanted charity. “Not at all,” I said. “Just looking for a place to spend Christmas out of the cold—I used to have some friends here.” He’d never heard of my old pal.
“You’d better go to the mission in Pocatello with the other paleface bums,” he said. “They’d eat your turkey. In fact, so will we. You can’t take beer there, so you’d best leave that here too. You can keep a couple for the road.” I thanked him and split. Chief Joseph got a little of his own back this Christmas. I spent the winter feast in an all-night Denny’s at a freeway interchange, where three people thought they were cute for asking if I was Santa Claus. The dishwasher said, “Hell no, he’s Jerry Garcia!” which was better. His boss called me a shiftless hippie and invited me to depart into the bleak predawn (“On your way, longhair,” were his actual words). Charged and convicted as a honky and a hippie on the same day—Merry Christmas!
December 26. Am I missing something? All I want for Christmas is a Magdalena. Oh, how I’d like to see my Maggie flying free and high, until I get hold of her. But I’m afraid she’ll be a long time coming. Meanwhile, my heart hurts. This bus is all the home I’ve got, these bus people all the company I need, and a little extra. The mere thought of Magdalena seems surreal in this overheated winter canister. I guess I’ll start the year in Jackson, and see what happens. Do mountain men still rendezvous there? Or mountain women? Can Magdalena be that far behind?
Mead closed the thick weather-beaten diary and rubbed his eyes. “He seems to have been some sort of a gypsy beachcomber,” he said aloud, “or a fly-by-night scavenger, ever ready to turn his little finds into a buck or a burger—or a beer. I think we could get along.” He shuffled his things and prepared to leave, but the reading was still on his mind. “Interesting guy, for sure. Thoughtful, too—maybe a tad cynical, though he seems to care about things. But that last bit”—he went back and reread the final entry—“about wanting a Magdalena—what the heck is that supposed to mean? What is a Magdalena? Maybe he was lonely or horny, and that’s some sort of slang of his for a woman. Or a prostitute—wasn’t Mary Magdalene supposed to be a harlot? Might make sense, after all the time he spent alone on the road. But why would he have to wait till spring to find a hooker?”
Mead liked having the amber spiders there because they were good listeners. He continued his exegesis of Carson’s entries: “But then he also refers to ‘his Maggie, flying high and free’—that hardly sounds like a pickup. Maybe Magdalena is a particular woman—a lost love, a summertime sweetheart? Somehow, I don’t think that’s it either. I wonder . . .” But he didn’t wonder much, as he nodded onto the laboratory table.
He roused himself and put the notebook away with his thoughts. “Well,” he told the patient spiders, “it’s too late to go home. Maybe I’ll mount some butterflies.” But before he had a chance to lift the lid of the relaxing jar, Mead’s head dropped again onto the table and he fell into a deep sleep. All night he slept there as the wind off Long Island Sound pelted the museum tower with snowballs. In his strange, wintry dreams, jolly beachcombers and Hollywood Indians in full Plains regalia rubbed shoulders in a truck stop named Maggie’s, where oysters and crabs held court with the walrus and the carpenter. The carpenter turned into the Cheshire cat, then a waitress in pink, serving little black biscuits like comic-book arrowheads to spiders in amber jars who morphed into hungry humans pawing at the windows and freezing to death outside.
When Mead awoke at seven, he was chilled, cramped, and agitated, and his neck felt like iron. He skipped class, spent the day wandering aimlessly around the snowy town and campus, and finally drifted home. “That journal is getting to me,” he muttered as he unlocked the door, and then and there he resolved to ignore the rest of the diaries.
In his mailbox he found a letter from his mother. He wondered if it would be like the others, factual and antiseptic, about as personal as a Christmas newsletter. He took his time opening it. “Dear Son,” he read.
We are well and hope you’ve avoided the flu they say is so rampant back there. Your brothers are both heavily into basketball and dating, but their grades are OK, so I suppose that’s fine. They promised to write and send scores, but don’t hold your breath. Lance is still over the moon about that game-winning basket he made against Raton. His head’s about as big as the basketball, so I hope that doesn’t set him up for a fall. Roger’s spending a lot of time warming the varsity bench, but he’s happy to be there. You know he’s always been the more even of the two. I’m just glad that neither one seems to be interested in drugs.
Your dad is looking forward to his conference in Maui, his class load has been so heavy. He invited me to come, but I think I won’t. Here are the boys’ school pics. They still look nothing like you. Roger asked was it the milkman or the mailman? Very cute.
James laughed, and wondered if she had too when she wrote it. He didn’t think he’d seen her really laugh since Molly had died. There was more family stuff, but almost nothing about her. And why in the world wouldn’t she go to Maui with his father?
Then a scrawl, crossed out, and this: “James, some days I almost don’t think I can make it. But I do. Will it get better? Dad says yes, but I don’t know whether I believe him—what else is he going to say? Sorry. We’re so proud of you. Write. Love, Your Mom.”
James tried to write back right away. He felt vaguely excited, since this was the first sign of his mother’s reaching out to him since the backpacking trip. But he gave up and talked himself to sleep instead. I haven’t a clue what to say to that: Will it get better? Does it get better? Ever? I wish I knew! Sounds like this Carson is none too sure either, and I don’t even know what’s bugging him. Oh, hell. But what the hell is a Magdalena supposed to be? Maybe I need one, too. I need something. So, Mom? God, I don’t know. He left his words unwritten and slept like a woodchuck in winter.
7
Snow tries to accumulate on the stony face of Magdalena Mountain, but Boreas scrapes it away with his rasping breath. As the storms grow in force and frequency into December, even the gale itself cannot remove its own white detritus. Then the peak changes color like the ptarmigan secreted on its slopes, from the gray-brown pelage of November to the pure white snow cone of January.
Marmots sleep their deep sleep that will last the mountain lion’s share of a year, while pumas prowl hungry across the frozen hems of the boulder fields and retreat, finally, to the forests below. The pikas slum
ber less—and less deeply—than the marmots. They awaken later than their brief summer somnolence allowed, but awaken just the same each day to preen their lice away and to munch on the fragrant hay they’ve so busily laid by. Toward spring, both the sacked-out rock chucks and the catnapping conies will give birth and suckle their young in the crannies made cozy by their own body heat.
Now the ptarmigan and the varying hares make only tracks and shadows, not patches of brown, on the pallid winterscape. They forsake the wind-ravaged fellfields for the relative shelter of the forest fringe, twisted and clumped subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce almost bare on top but thick-skirted below the trimline of the wind. The ptarmigan especially haunt the edges of the willow swales, feeding on their tight-packed buds. These snow ghosts are followed by hopeful coyotes, still brown and leaner than ever.
No one comes to Magdalena Mountain in the winter except a few foolhardy climbers and the helicopters sometimes sent to pluck them off. Cross-country skiers remain far below, and jets swerve north to avoid this conical object in their takeoff path as they gain altitude on their way from Denver to Salt Lake, Boise, Portland, or Seattle. Any climber reaching the summit has to clamber across hundreds of boulders, ice-rimed, slick, or cracking under winter’s weight. Frost probes every cleft, then swells and splits the stones asunder. But no climber, sure to be quick or be dead, would hang around to watch the prying frost do its work, nor to listen for the slow heartbeat of marmot or the faster pulse of pika in the rockpile below.
With the summer sounds gone, the piping of the marmot stilled, the sentry-squeak of the pika silenced, Magdalena Mountain seems all but lifeless on the surface. But beneath the snow and the stones, life carries on, if not exactly teeming. Among the few creatures as happy now as ever are the grylloblattids. Wingless, primitive relatives of crickets, more resembling roaches, these ice crawlers (as they are called) cherish the cold and die if they become too warm. Glaciers, snowfields, and rockslides are their natural homes. In the dead of winter, a grylloblattid prowls the talus slope in search of any animal food it can find. With its slender antennae it probes here and there as its six legs carry it speedily over cold stone, solid ice, and rotting vegetation. A pale amber predator, the ice crawler works the frozen, uncrowded territory in its search for winter food.
Magdalena Mountain Page 4
