Big Dreams (11 page)

Miller was slow to develop his talent. His initial effort was a diary that he kept while he was slaving in the gold mines around the mountain. After that, he sojourned among the Modoc tribe for
five years and later practiced law in Oregon, but the desire to write still dogged him, and in 1870 he jumped into the lap of literature by traveling to London via New York, a city that gave him the willies.

“I have fought many battles with Indians,” he confided to his journal. “I have seen rough men in the mines, but such ruffians as assailed me on landing from the Jersey ferry I have never encountered before.”

In Nottingham, Miller left a laurel wreath on the tomb of his hero, Lord Byron. He met no success with English publishers and had to print and distribute his book of poems,
Songs of the Sierra
, himself. It earned some marvelous reviews and made its author a literary darling, who dined with Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and frequented salons in buckskin-and-leather outfits crowned with a sombrero.

Miller became known as the “Byron of the Rockies.” His
Life Among the Modoc
, a prose memoir, appeared in 1873 and immortalized the Butte in its very first line, which read, “Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the great black heart of Northern California.”

Although Miller truly loved the mountain, he chose to spend his royalties on a rambling estate in Oakland hills, where he passed his declining years as a white-bearded, bohemian sage, who drank, caroused, and championed the cause of free love. He died at the age of seventy-seven, in 1913, another dreamer who’d struck it rich in California.

M
OUNT
S
HASTA HAD A REPUTATION
as a holy place among certain Indian tribes, so it made sense that the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives should have an abbey on Summit Road, even though they had landed there by chance.

A dust of fresh snow covered the ridges of the mountain down to an altitude of about six thousand feet on the cool, sunny morning that I drove up there. Manzanita bushes were growing along the
abbey’s walls. The crisp air and the moisture had brought out the streaked marbling of the wood, and the branches were clustered with tiny, white, bell-shaped flowers.

At the main gate, I picked up a security phone and spoke to a person inside. About ten minutes later, a monk came forward to admit me. She wore a Russian-style winter hat and a brown robe sashed at the waist with a purple cincture. She was in her forties, although the bright focus of her presence made her look younger. Her hair was shaved to a graying stubble. She had ruddy cheeks from working outdoors, and eyes that were alive to nuances, very clear and blue and open.

All over California, religious communities such as the abbey were still cropping up, as they had been for centuries, taking advantage of the space, the freedom, and the notorious receptivity of people in the state to new ideas—or, in the case of Buddhism, an old idea newly translated. I had been attracted to the apparently simple Buddhist canon from the moment I’d moved to San Francisco, but I soon learned how complicated simplicity could be. Balancing a book by D. T. Suzuki on my lap, I would wrench myself into a near-full-lotus position and fail miserably at the task of trying not to think and trying
not
to not think.

From my efforts, though, I gained the smallest glimmer of what a Buddhist might be hoping to accomplish, and discovered, too, that out West it was easier to incorporate a spiritual dimension into my life than it had been in the East.

I didn’t know why that should be so, whether it had to do with the glory of the land or with a renewed interest in nature and the very idea of creation, but it was also the case with the monk who was my guide. She was from a Methodist family in Nebraska. Her grades were so good in school that she had followed an academic career path without thinking much about it, but she also had a spiritual longing that wouldn’t go away.

As a child, she had discovered a shelf of books about world religions at her neighborhood library and had read them with enthusiasm.
After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she moved to Eugene, Oregon, where she did typing and secretarial work. She was in a phase of shopping around for some kind of spiritual discipline when she began investigating Soto Zen, the form of Buddhism practiced at Shasta Abbey.

As her thirtieth birthday approached, she decided to attend one of the retreats that the abbey offers to outsiders. It held enough interest for her that she became a lay Buddhist, but after only a few years in such a role she found it in herself to enter the monastic life and train as a Buddhist priest. She knew by then that she was on the right path, and that Soto Zen was the correct practice for her.

There were about forty monks in training at Shasta Abbey, she said, about half of them men and half of them women. The abbess and spiritual leader was P. T. Jiyu-Kennett, an Englishwoman who was certified as a priest in Japan and had started the abbey in 1970. D. T. Suzuki had introduced her to Mahayana Buddhism in the 1950s, and she later wrote a classic about Zen training with the wonderful title
Selling Water by the River
, a business I had conducted far too often.

The abbey owned sixteen acres near the mountain. The grounds had once been a resort, and the stone buildings were the work of an Italian mason. A walkway, roofed against the heavy winter snows, connected one building to another. As we strolled around, monks kept circulating, greeting each other with a bow and clasped hands while they went about their chores.

We paused to look at a Kanzeon garden that was used for teaching Sunday school classes to children. In Soto Zen, Kanzeon is the
bodhisattva
who represents compassion and mercy. The garden was an elaborate rock formation that the kids had populated with toys—miniature plastic cowboys, rubber snakes, dinosaurs, even transformers.

Next, we saw the Ceremony Hall, a dark, quiet room with stained-glass windows. The monks meditated in a Meditation Hall adjacent to it four or five times a day, for thirty to forty-five minutes
each time, from their wake-up call at six in the morning until lights-out at ten. They meditated while they worked, too, and in the evening there was a period of walking meditation. The opportunities to meditate were endless, really, because the monks were charged with the duty of recognizing the Buddha nature, or spiritual value, in the most ordinary activities.

The notion—or so it seemed to me—was to make yourself an entirely conscious being, aware of every passing tick of life, and aware, too, of all the lives that were ticking by around you. And the trick, of course, was not to be attached to any of it, but to consecrate its transience instead—a transience that included your own few fleeting seconds of enlightenment.

Little wonder, then, that the Buddha smiled.

At the abbey, the monks grew most of their food. The head gardener was a lanky man in khakis and a blue flannel shirt, who had a goofy-looking, flapped hat on his head to protect him from the sun. I have never met an unhappy gardener, not ever, and this monk did nothing to break that streak.

The monk’s spring crops were just sprouting. His snow peas, lettuce, chard, and fava beans were all coming in, but it was the favas that turned him on. He leaned on the handle of his pitchfork, just as a gardener should do, and spoke of how the beans would be harvested and dried, articulating the procedure so tenderly on their behalf that each fava seemed to be a unique organism of considerable worth.

My visit to Shasta Abbey ended in a little gift shop, where I bought some books and pamphlets and asked my guide what it was like for her to live on Mount Shasta, with its snowy peak constantly in evidence. The mountain flowed in and out of her thoughts, she said. It would disappear in clouds, or in fog, or in gray weather, only to appear again.

F
ROM
M
OUNT
S
HASTA
, I took Highway 89 toward Fall River Valley and cattle country, going through some more lumber towns on the brink of disaster or already fallen. McCloud had a cluster of by-now familiar For Sale signs on the houses around a working mill that was just limping along. The town once had its own railroad, the McCloud River Railroad, that connected the Southern Pacific line to the Great Northern line. McCloud’s mills, even into the 1960s, had cut a million board-feet of wood every year.

Pondosa, down the road, was in much worse shape. It had gone to dust and pine needles, the rot of the earth devouring the abandoned company houses on the fringe of a defunct mill. The windows in the houses were all busted out, leaving shards of glass stuck in the frames. The doorknobs had been jimmied free, and the doors were nailed shut to keep the floorboards from being stolen. The trees, great firs and pines, had all been slashed and toppled, and they lay on the ground bleaching and decomposing, their fibers consumed by termites.

Beyond Pondosa, I turned onto A-19, the McArthur Road, traveling southeast and watching as the forests began to open onto the valley. There was more light, and the dark greens and browns of thickly timbered land were replaced by more alfalfa fields and the blues of lakes and streams.

Fall River, a spring-fed creek as lovely as any in the state, ran by the road at Glenburn, and I remembered how I had once met John McArthur, a cattle rancher, at the bar of a lodge where I was staying on a fishing trip. His family was the family of McArthur Road and the town of McArthur, emigrants from Scotland who’d been in the valley for ages. When I showed an interest in seeing his spread, he told me to give him a call in advance, any time, at home or at The Buckhorn, his saloon of choice.

The fishing was too good, though, and I couldn’t tear myself away from the river, but I thought that I might call McArthur this trip.

Fall River Valley was among my favorite spots in California. The sense of space, the broad vistas, the fenced pastures dotted with cows, they all took me back to a primal image of the West that I had formed as a boy, relying on comic books and movies. I liked the streams flowing through the valley, and the flocks of ducks and geese flying by overhead, their bodies framed against a big sky that was sprinkled at night with a million stars.

On the horizon, there was the craggy shape of Mount Lassen, another cinder cone, and when the weather was clear Mount Shasta, too, was visible in the distance. The trout also gratified me, fat browns and rainbows lying in the slack current, little monarchs of a watery, food-rich kingdom. Above all, it was the calm of Fall River Valley that appealed to me, a feeling that I would never be cramped or invaded or pushed up against by others, that there was, in the end, quite enough room for everybody.

So I started having fantasies—ranch fantasies, middle-aged cowboy fantasies. I imagined myself on the porch of my spread, picking my teeth with the stem of a wild oat and dreaming about the evening rise, when feeding trout would surface to dimple the river. The fantasy was captivating enough that I stopped at a real estate office in Fall River Mills, the largest town in the valley

The realtors on duty were Hoss and Georgie Bader. As his name implied, Hoss was a very sizable fellow. He looked as if Ben Cartwright had raised him on the Ponderosa, but he was really a refugee from Los Angeles. Georgie came from Fall River Mills. Like the McArthurs, her family went way back. Her grandfather was the first white baby to be born at Fork Crook, a military outpost nearby that had been built in 1857 as a shelter against Indian attacks.

“I’m thinking about buying a ranch,” I said, surprised by my own boldness. “Have you got one to sell me?”

Hoss and Georgie reeled off some properties. There was a tract ranchette on one-and-a-half acres that went for $69,000. There was a huge, clapboard fixer-upper farmhouse on twenty-five acres for
$187,500. But an actual ranch? There weren’t many big ranches anymore. They’d been parceled off and subdivided to provide homes for all the retired people who were coming to the valley, golfers who played on the links at Fall River Country Club, over by Fort Crook. Farmers had also grabbed some of the ranchland, to grow such exotic crops as garlic and wild rice.

“People are retiring here?” I asked, stunned by a vision of arthritic duffers in tam-o’-shanters chipping and wedging where the cowpies used to be.

“Yes, sir,” Hoss said. “More and more of them. Our own young people don’t stay around. There’s no jobs for them.”

The Baders were singing a song I’d heard before, from Crescent City to Weed. They gave me some tourist newspapers that had copious real estate listings. The entirety of northern California, it seemed, was up for grabs.

As I was going out the door, I asked if John McArthur was still around, thinking that he might have sold out, as well, but Georgie laughed and said fondly, “Oh, that John McArthur! Did you know that he still gets up on horseback and drives his cattle home right down the middle of Highway 299?”

T
HINGS HAPPEN ON A CATTLE RANCH
, unexpected things. The cows in their lazy grazing create an illusion of placidity, but accidents are always lurking beneath that deceptive surface to keep a rancher on his toes—a horse bursting free from its corral, machinery quitting, a hired hand getting served his divorce papers and peeling into the next county on a four-day drunk, or, for John McArthur, a valve breaking on an irrigation pipe and spewing precious water in every direction.