Moontrap - Don Berry (50 page)

"
It was probably the birth canal for the Beat
Generation," said Berry, who was more interested in painting
than poetry at the time. "It was classic post-war Bohemianism,
and also one of the richest experiences of my life. The quality of
minds involved was extraordinary, and it was also hugely funny."

As a freshman, Berry was one of the editors of the
Reed literary magazine. "I once rejected a poem as being too
derivative of Lew Welch," he remembered. "Lew gave me hell
later, because he had written it."

Berry, Snyder, and Whalen studied with the legendary
calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds, an inspiration to generations of
Reedies. Reynolds would tell his students, "You've got a million
bad letters in your fist, and the only way to get rid of them is to
write them down."

"
Lloyd was one of the four great teachers of my
life," Berry said. "Not necessarily in any specific detail,
but in the sense that he was the first teacher who ignited me, as a
candle is ignited from a flame already burning. He showed the most
astonishing confidence in my ability. When Iwas a freshman, Lloyd had
me deliver the lectures on Chinese art to his art history classes.
Those were the only lectures they received on the subject, and Lloyd
seemed content. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me ...
The clichés of a young artist. Lordy, lordy."

Berry left Reed in 1951 to earn a living. He had met
his future wife by this time and was beginning to write science
fiction, a genre that appealed to him because he could sell stories,
learn to write, and let his imagination wander freely. His goal was
to write a short story every week and he sold about a dozen between
1956 and 1958. But he wanted to write something different, a
commercial novel set in the present day on the Oregon coast, and
wanted, he said, "to include some folk stories, or Indian
legends, or something to give some local depth and flavor."

Wyn Berry brought home a study by Reed historian
Dorothy Johansen of coastal Indian cultures around 1850. Berry's
reaction to it, as described in a 1997 email, deserves to be quoted
at some length:

This was not academic history, it was a
compilation of very personal anecdotes and records of ordinary
people—not "history-makers."

At one point Dorothy Jo was describing a
trip made by Elbridge Trask from the northern coast down to Tillamook
Bay (where he later settled) to scout out land. She commented that
nobody ever could figure out why he made some particular decision.

Well, I knew why, because it was exactly the
decision I would have made under the circumstances. And at that
instant, I had a small epiphany about the nature of history. History
was actually made by people. People like me, even. This had never
occurred to me before, as I had no sense of history myself, and no
particular interest in it.

That night I climbed up on the roof of the
Red House and sat on the peak to watch the sunset over the fields and
the Willamette River. I had demonstrated that I could write
commercial magazine fiction. But I increasingly felt that if I wanted
this career to last for twenty or thirty years I would have to write
something that was deeper, that used more of me than commercial
writing, or I would eventually become bored. I have always preferred
doing things I don't know how to do.

Watching that sunset, I decided to change
direction completely. I decided to write a serious novel of history,
and Elbridge Trask's exploratory trip to Tillamook Bay would be the
story, and Trask the main character. The next morning I drove down to
the Oregon coast, and eventually found the Tillamook County
Historical Museum.

The museum was a treasure trove for Berry, who
said that the material he found there served as the basis for all
three novels. He spent several weeks reading and copying everything
in sight, then moved on to the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.
He said he wrote Trask at the same time he was doing his research,
"and by the time I had finished the research, I had also
finished the novel."

Maybe so, but there is much that it is in the novel
that can't be found in a museum. A bare-bones summary of the plot
doesn't begin to do it justice: In 1848, Elbridge Trask, once a
trapper and mountain man, has settled on the Clatsop Plains but feels
restless. He decides to take a trip to Tillamook Bay and is
accompanied by Wakila, a young Clatsop Indian, and Charley Kehwa, a
tamanzwis man or spiritual leader of the tribe, who acts as a guide.
The party travels from present-day Gearhart south along the coast
across Tillamook Head, Cape Falcon, and Neahkanie Mountain. After a
shocking, unexpected tragedy, they reach the bay and are greeted by
Kilchis, the chief of the Killamook tribe (Berry notes in
A
Majority of Scoundrels
that Tillamook was
usually spelled with a "k" sound until 1852). As a result
of a power struggle within the tribe and to prove his worthiness,
Trask volunteers to go on a vision quest called the Searching, a
purification ritual involving fasting and prayer. He survives it, at
great cost, and is free.

That is initially most striking about
Trask
is its clear, sure sense of place. Glen Love, professor
emeritus of English at the University of Oregon and a great champion
of Berry's work, wrote in a short study of his novels that "a
regional work of literature may be defined as one in which landscape
is character, perhaps the central character, so much so that a change
in setting would completely alter and destroy the essential quality
of the work."

By that standard,
Trask
is a regional work. With love and precision, Berry
describes everything from Short Sands Beach ("the white lines of
breakers were tiny as they marched slowly in, and along their humped
green backs ran the quicksilver reflections of the sun") to a
rainstorm in the Coast Range ("The rain came like whiplashes,
driven out of the low clouds with a startling viciousness. It drummed
and whacked against the waxy leaves of the salal with such force it
seemed certain to tear them from their stems.")

Everyone in
Trask
is unsettled and unsure of where they fit. Trask has
traveled the world as a sailor and a mountain man before settling on
the Clatsop Plains but now is itching to strike out for somewhere
new. Wakila has come of age in a tribe that has been decimated by
smallpox and is now succumbing to gambling and alcohol. Charley Kehwa
is a spiritual leader who has lived among whites and knows the
inevitability of their push for land and power. He sees in Trask a
rare white man who respects Indian culture and perhaps can prevent
what happened to the Clatsop from happening to the Killamooks.

Trask's restlessness is much more than a mountain
man's independence and love of freedom. In an unsure, inarticulate
way, he is on a quest to find a deeper meaning to his life long
before he goes on the Searching. He explicitly rejects Christianity
and Western society but is unsettled by Charley's dreams and
premonitions. He looks to nature and looks within himself in a way
that reflects a traditional Eastern path toward enlightenment without
ever explicitly stating it.

That this takes place in a novel set in the Oregon
Territory in 1848, within the context of an adventure story about
first contact between white settlers and Indians, is remarkable. It's
as if Berry gutted a Louis L'Amour novel and replaced it with
Somerset Maugham's
The Razors Edge
.
The Searching scenes are the soul of the novel and the final chapter
(added, according to Wyn Berry, when the novel was in galleys) is
stunningly powerful, a coda that gives fresh meaning to all that has
come before.

"All his senses shared the same bright clarity;
the intensity of any simple act of perception was almost unbearable,"
Berry writes. "The sheer brilliance of color was blinding; the
sweet, clear tone of every sound came to him almost as a physical
shock, making him catch his breath. The swinging glide of a gull came
to have an almost-grasped significance that kept his mind hovering on
the edge of joy."

Trask
had a troubled
publishing history. Berry said his first agent told him "there
was no possible way he could submit such a book to publishers, and
thought it better if we parted ways. Which we did." A different
agent sold the book to Doubleday, where it was turned over to an
editor who Berry thought "confused himself with an author."
Unwilling to make the requested changes, Berry returned his advance
and withdrew the book at Christmas of 1958. Viking Press eventually
bought it and published it in 1960, to strong reviews. (
The
Saturday Review
called it great.
The
Northwest Review
said it was the best first
novel by an Oregonian since
Honey in the
Horn.
)

Berry already had moved on.
A
Majority of Scoundrels: An Informal History ofthe Rocky Mountain Furr
Company
was published in 1961. It is an
amazing work, a combination of scholarship and narrative that proves
true the cliché about history coming alive and shows why many of
those closest to Berry considered him a genius. He did much of his
research through microfilms from the Missouri Historical Society and
was able to go where some of the finest western historians of the
century—men such as Hiram M. Chittenden, Dale Morgan, and Bernard
DeVoto—had gone before and break new ground.

Moontrap
(1962) and
To
Build a Ship
(1963) were mostly written while
Berry was traveling, first in France and then around the world. He
carried copies of some of the material he had found in the Tillamook
museum with him, including a typed copy of pioneer Warren Vaughn's
diary that is the backbone of
To Build a Ship
.
Wyn Berry, who read and edited all of her husband's manuscripts, said
there was something in what the pioneers did and thought that moved
Berry.

"He identified with their values," she
said. "He thought the kind of quiet, everyday heroism they had
was undervalued in the present day, and he felt many of the
agriculture people had sold their birthright. The mountain men, the
guys who had to adjust to society—he loved them the most."

There are references to Elbridge Trask in both
Moontrap
and
To
Build a Ship
and the books make sense when
read in succession. There are plenty of discrepancies and departures
from the historical record, all of them falling under the large
umbrella of artistic license. Berry said 90 percent of
To
Build a Ship
comes from Vaughn's diary but
the novel is narrated by Thaler, not Vaughn, and has a sensibility
that is wholly Berry's.

Like
Trask
,
Moontrap
has a lead
character who is a mountain man struggling to find a place in settled
society. In this case, the setting is Oregon City in 1850 and the
character is Johnson Monday, a trapper who wants to make a home with
his Indian wife but has "never really been willing to accept
this new world he was living in. He had never committed himself
fully, and now he had to pay for it."

Monday pays for his independence early and often, and
so do others who live outside the boundaries drawn by the newcomers.
Monday's old trapper friend, an unrepentant, uncivilized mountain man
named Webster T Webster, is the comic relief, the moral center, and
the scene-stealer of
Moontrap
.
Monday wrestles with his dilemmas; Webb curses at his and clings hard
to the life he loves. Webb is Berry's most memorable character, one
the author said jumped up during the novel's creation and demanded a
larger role.

A brilliantly rendered centerpiece of the novel is
the trial and hanging of a group of Cayuse Indians for the Whitman
massacre six months earlier. The Indians who were hanged almost
certainly were not directly involved in the massacre at the Walla
Walla mission, a fact that didn't give pause to those who executed
them.

After the hanging, Monday and Webb visit John
McLoughlin. Berry's sketch of the eagle in his roost at Oregon City,
retired from the Hudson's Bay Company and fighting futilely against
the Americans who were biting the hand that had so generously fed
them, is a poignant snapshot of McLoughlin's final years:

"I heard there was some trouble about
the land," Monday said, embarrassed. The trouble was simply that
the Americans, Thurston most prominently, were methodically stripping
McLoughlin of all his holdings in the Oregon country, their only
legal weapon a campaign of hate against the "damned jesuitical
rascal of a Hudson's Bay man."

"Yes, yes, quite. But it has all been
turned over to intermediaries for settlement now, and I am a bit
hopeful. I am expecting them momentarily with the papers. But now—"
McLoughlin suddenly swept his arms up in a great despairing gesture
to heaven. "Now, Mr. Monday."

When civilization comes crashing down on Monday, it
is Webb who takes frontier revenge for his friend and flees to Saddle
Mountain, where he holds off the pursuing mob and builds a moontrap,
a more explicitly Eastern practice than anything in
Trask
.
Berry said that despite his immersion in Chinese literature and
friendship with Snyder and Whalen, he did not study Zen Buddhism
until a good ten years after he wrote his novels.