Fire Season (23 page)

“Any time. Just say the word.”

I wave as the chopper lifts off. The pilot responds with one thumb up.

By noon both smokes are smoked, and I’m back in bed with a headache.

M
ore than once, when craving a cigarette here, I’ve thought of Jack Kerouac becoming so desperate for something to smoke that he rolled some coffee grounds early during his summer alone on Desolation Peak in 1956. I first encountered this anecdote in a book by John Suiter called
Poets on the Peaks
, a beautiful study, in prose and photographs, of the effect lookout work had on Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and their friend the poet Philip Whalen, all of whom spent at least one summer in the North Cascades in the 1950s. Having read everything they ever published about their time as lookouts—most of it pretty excellent—I was left craving more. Suiter’s book clued me in to the existence of an unpublished diary Kerouac kept over his sixty-three days on Desolation. An afternoon of research revealed it was housed with Kerouac’s papers in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature, so one autumn I traveled east and made an appointment to see it.

On an upper floor of the library, at the end of a quiet hallway, I sat in a locked room watched over by a gimlet-eyed curator as I flipped through the Golden West notebook Kerouac had bought for nineteen cents. It was small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, and every page had been filled from top to bottom and margin to margin with Kerouac’s tiny, impeccable handwriting; he’d even written on the inside of the front and back covers when all the pages were full. For a few moments I simply sat with it in front of me, marveling at its fragility. I was surprised I hadn’t been ordered to handle it with gloves.

When I opened it, the first thing I saw was Kerouac’s grocery list. Having made similar lists at the beginning of every fire season, I can hardly describe the thrill this gave me, the knowledge that he’d chewed Beechnut gum and eaten Hi-Ho crackers up on Desolation. He’d even used brand names! I’d expected to spend a couple of hours with the notebook, flipping through it and making some notes. Instead, over three straight days of frenzied writing spanning twenty hours—a marathon session of transcription that left me with flaring pain in my right hand—I copied the whole thing into my own notebook with a No. 2 pencil. (Pens were strictly forbidden.) Each summer now I bring it with me to the peak and read it for its talismanic power on days I feel blue.

Kerouac, at the time, was thirty-four years old. Restless and broke, he’d arrived on the mountain with two cents to his name. Although he’d written half a dozen novels, only one—
The Town and the City
—had so far been published.
On the Road
, the book that made him famous, would not appear until the following year. Hanging out in California, becoming enamored of Buddhism, he’d heard his friends Whalen and Snyder tell colorful tales about their time as fire lookouts; Snyder recommended that Kerouac write to Washington’s Mount Baker National Forest and apply for the job. Snyder’s string of lookout summers had ended in 1954 when he was blacklisted by the government for his pacifist, anarchist, and pro-union sympathies.

Kerouac, torn between social and solitary impulses, had long dreamed of a mountain hermitage. In 1954, while reading the Lankavatara Sutra, a Buddhist scripture, he’d underlined the advice that “one should have his abode where one can see all things from the point of view of solitude.” The frenetic cross-country trips, the hitchhiking, the freight-hopping, the drinking and drugs and parties he’d experienced in his
On the Road
years had left him hungry for peace and quiet and a place to call home. “I don’t want to be a drunken hero of the generation suffering everywhere with everyone,” he’d written. “I want to be a quiet saint living in a shack in solitary meditation of universal mind… . ”

On July 5, 1956, he finally got his wish. That morning, in the Skagit River country of northwestern Washington, after a week of training with firefighters in the art of digging line and building trail, he left the Diablo guard station and floated across Ross Lake by tugboat. With the assistant district ranger and a mule packer leading the way with his supplies—including $51.13 worth of groceries he’d bought on credit—he rode the five muddy miles to Desolation in a rainstorm. On top he saw a round peak, snow in the coulees, early wildflowers; he spent his first day in classic lookout fashion, cleaning up the mess left by overwintering rats and mice.

For the first time in years he embarked on a long stretch of sobriety—completely off booze, though he did bring with him a small amount of amphetamines—and the results were not always lovely. Within the first week he would write, “Here I am on Desolation Peak not ‘coming face to face with God’ as I sententiously predicted, but myself, my shitty frantic screaming at bugs self—There is no God, there is no Buddha, there is nothing but just
this
and what name shall we give it? SHIT.” All through the coming months he would alternate between states of euphoria and states of despair. “Feeling, now, happier than in years—Is it solitude or the absence of liquor?” The very next day he plunged into a funk after killing a mouse; it had raided the food basket Kerouac had rigged from the ceiling. Finding it there nibbling on green pea powder, he’d bashed it over the head with a flashlight. The murder violated his Buddhist principles and left him feeling guilty and morose.

His response to Buddhism—he was reading the Diamond Sutra almost daily—would fluctuate wildly as well. On July 12 he wrote: “I’m not going to be taken in by any ideas of transcendental compassionate communication, for it’s just a nothing… . I’d as soon go back to Jesus & keep my mouth shut, as spin their fucking wheel (of the ‘Buddhas numberless’).” Three days later he wrote of meditating on a ridge, pondering “exuberant fertility and infinite potentiality” and of how he woke to “another beautiful morning above the sea of flat shining clouds.” He was thrilled to see a pair of car headlights tracing a mountain road across the line in Canada. The joy, however, did not last: “Hot, miserable, locusts or plagues of insects, heat, no air, no clouds,” he wrote on July 19. “For the fuck of me I’d like to get the fuck out of here—No cigarettes—NOTHING.” Whatever else you may say about him, the man never left a doubt about the way he felt when he held a pencil in his hand. “I’m always deciding something & writing it down as tho it were the final word and then contradicting it later,” he admitted. “I’ll write it down anyway:—because it may win me.”

Fourteen days into his season of solitude, he gave in to craving and radioed his boss to have a tin of tobacco delivered across the lake to the trailhead. Two days later he hiked down, spent the night on a Forest Service barge, floated around the lake while the other men fished, ate steaks with them, drank liquor with them, and, carrying a pound of tobacco and a sheaf of rolling papers under his arm, hiked back to the lookout in the morning. The company seemed to have done him good. He began writing late into the night, working on a novel about the years he’d lived in the Queens neighborhood of Ozone Park. He drank hot milk and honey in the evenings. He did push-ups and sit-ups, performed yoga head stands in the meadow. He played canasta, smoked, sang old show tunes he remembered, smoked some more, watched the northern lights over Mount Hozomeen. (“Hozomeen, Hozomeen, most mournful mountain I ever seen,” he would write in
The Dharma Bums
.) He read a biography of John Barrymore. He planned and made lists, including one under the heading “List of Things for My New Life”:

1. Wear soft-soled canvas shoes & slacks (chino grays) & sports shirts—& a new black leather jacket

2. Make plays for women young & old

3. Take money from homosexuals (that’s a joke, son)

3A. Stand on my head

4. Drink

5. Take long walks in cities (Mexico City, Venice, Paris, London, Madrid, Dublin, Stockholm & Berlin)

6. Write the Duluoz Legend in Deliberate Prose without stimulus, spontaneous prose with stimulus (muscarine and benzedrine)

6A. Smoke roll-your-owns

7. Simply know that it makes no difference

7A. Write plays off tape recorder

8. Have fun

Day by day he kept a tally of the money he was making, $9.50 a shift, $350 as of August 1, money he would use for travel when his gig was up. Some days all he could do was yearn for the place he wasn’t. He thought of Mexico City, where he’d stay in bed on weekend nights eating chocolate. He dreamed of Venice, good Italian food, reading outdoors along the canals. Or New York, where he’d live with his mother in the Village and work as a sportswriter. Then a storm would blow over, the looming peaks of Hozomeen would pierce the clouds, and he’d return to raving in ecstasy. He copied long transliterations of the Diamond Sutra into his journal. He sought the Void. “Wait, wait,” he wrote in early August, “who wants to die in bitterness?—duck takes to water, man takes to hope… ”

Decades before the Forest Service amended its fire policy, he perceived the futility and hubris of attacking every smoke. “As for lightning and fires,” he wrote in
Desolation Angels
, “who, what American individual loses, when a forest burns, and what did nature do about it for a million years up to now?” He went the whole summer without calling in a single smoke. The one time he was the first to see a fire, his radio failed in a lightning storm. Later he ran out of batteries and had to have extras dropped by parachute. The cargo chute got hung up in a fir tree on a precipice, and Kerouac had to crawl on all fours to retrieve it. He heard a fire crew make a request for resupply—including a fifth of whisky, a case of beer, and two gallons of ice cream. The radio chatter amused him so much he copied some of it down. (“I wrote him a letter last fall and told him where I was and all”; “I’m back here in the middle of nowhere—At least I think so”; “But the Lost Creek Trail they don’t believe is in existence any longer.”) He found bear sign at his garbage pit, a hundred yards down the mountain—old milk cans punctured by claws. Swinging from despair to mania, he counted down the days he had left, complaining of boredom, lack of energy, lack of booze.

I wonder sometimes if, like me, he’d been given every other weekend off in town to hit the bars and mail some letters and fish the lake and check the baseball scores, or maybe, if he’d simply had an AM radio, whether he’d have thought,
Hell, I can do this—this is the sweet simple bhikkhu life
, and then come back each summer to escape the fame that threatened to swallow him after
On the Road
and maybe even live a few extra years, since, as we know, every day spent in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life. A period of distance from the demon lightning, a chance to clear the mind and calm the nerves. Futile speculation, I know. Presumptuous too:
If only the poor bastard had been more like me…
But I can’t help it. His story is too sad; it begs for an ending other than the one he found, in which he drank himself to death in 1969 while living with his mother in Florida, raging in spastic bitterness.

And anyway the lookout’s life was probably not for him, not for more than one summer. “I’d rather have drugs and liquor and divine visions than this empty barren fatalism on a mountaintop,” he wrote toward the end of his stint. These words are especially poignant when you consider that two years earlier he’d written to Allen Ginsberg: “I have crossed the ocean of suffering and found the path at last.” For Kerouac, the path of Buddhism proved too difficult, too alien to his temperament, and he eventually retreated into the mystical French Catholicism he’d known as a boy. Its fascination with the martyrdom of the Crucifixion jibed with his sense of himself as a doomed prophet destined for self-annihilation. The essential Buddhist ethic—do no violence to any living being—was a principle that tragically eluded him in his treatment of himself.

For most of his last month on Desolation he was eager to get the call that it was over. He vowed to get back to a life of adventure, complained he had nothing to write about alone on a mountain, even as he scribbled furiously. Never did man nor woman make more of sixty-three days alone on a lookout, recycling and revising the experience across multiple books and literary forms. He reworked a few observations from his journal in writing the final pages of
The Dharma Bums
, mostly passages that captured the brighter side of the experience; he wrote a calm and sentimentalized version of that summer in a reminiscence for the essay collection
Lonesome Traveler
; he went deeper and darker in the opening section of
Desolation Angels,
by far the most honest account of his lookout experience in its highs and lows, with many long passages borrowed almost verbatim from his journal; and he wrote a dozen “Desolation Blues” poems gathered posthumously in his
Book of Blues.
He also exaggerated the length of his stay to more than seventy days and fudged on the austerity of his solitude, neglecting to mention his trip down the mountain for tobacco and the resulting night of revelry on the float.

Though he was not yet known as “the avatar of the Beat Generation,” he believed he would make his mountain famous, foresaw that streams of hikers would one day undertake the trek to Desolation Peak as if to a holy shrine: “Such places (where the scripture is observed), however wretched they may be, will be loved as though they were famous memorial parks and monuments to which countless pilgrims and sages will come (to Desolation Peak!) to offer homage and speeches and dedications. And over them the angels of the unborn and the angels of the dead will hover like a cloud.” More than fifty years later the “little Pagoda Lookout” still hugs the top of the peak; the pilgrims come singly and in groups to see the view that Kerouac saw, sit in the shack where Kerouac sat, pace the meadow where Kerouac paced, and generally try to soak up a little of the dharma perceived to hang over the place where Kerouac tried and failed to put his demons to rest. And at least one lookout on the other end of the Rockies reads his journal sometimes late at night or on days of mist and rain, swept up in the turbulent energy of his prose, awed by the naked force of his honesty, the depth of his longing, the doomed quest of his search for lasting peace.