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  ii A weidling is a flat-bottomed boat – a type of flat-bottomed punt that can be tracked back to Celtic boats built more than 2,000 years ago. The weidling is traditionally constructed from solid wood, although today some boats are also made from plywood, plastic or aluminium. It is usually around 9 or 10 metres (30 or 33ft) in length. In the Middle Ages, the weidling was used for river transportation and fishing. Today, the boat is primarily used in Switzerland, on the Rhine and its tributaries. It is used as a leisure and pleasure craft, and as a passenger ferry. The sport of Wasserfahren in Switzerland is conducted almost exclusively with weidlings.

  iii Project for a Rift Valley Crossing, Simon Starling, 2015. Artwork details: 53 × 474 × 85cm. Material description: Canoe cast in Dead Sea magnesium, two paddles, two canvas seats, Dead Sea water, tanks, wooden welding jig, two silver gelatin prints.

  iv After exhibiting the canoe in Nottingham in 2016, Simon returned it to source and paddled the tricky, potentially treacherous crossing from Israel to Jordan.

  v ‘Eighteen months ago, British artist Simon Starling dropped a replica of a sculpture by Henry Moore into Lake Ontario. This weekend, visitors to the Power Plant gallery in Toronto will see the result as part of a retrospective of work by Turner Prize-winner Starling . . . The work he’s created in Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) is partly the story of a Henry Moore sculpture, but also the story of the zebra mussel, an invasive species that will cover any object that sits long enough in Great Lakes water.’ – ‘British artist pulls sculpture from bottom of Lake Ontario’, CBC Arts News, 29 February 2008.

  IV

  DESOLATION PEAK, WA, USA

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take up art. Art is the only work open to people who can’t get along with others and still want to be special.’

  – Alasdair Gray1

  My flight from London to Seattle was at 09:50 GMT on Monday 18 September. At check-in I was asked when I would be returning and I said early October-ish since I was not sure. I haven’t actually booked a ticket home, I explained. ‘Ah, then you cannot fly!’ said the Norwegian Air lady brightly. Oh dear, I said. But I need to fly. What do I need to do so I can fly?

  Book a ticket home, it turned out. So I lugged my duffel and rucksack back into the mêlée of the south terminal, found a seat, sat down, booked a flight home with my phone and then, as instructed, walked back to the Norwegian Air desk, past the angry side-eye queue, and the smiling lady, having made sure my there-and-back-again itinerary was solid, cheerfully checked me in and wished me well.

  This was all rather more harum-scarum than I’d have liked and in retrospect I was probably cutting things a bit fine, but the fact was that my US plans were in tatters and I was waiting on news from an unresponsive Mars base in Utah.

  Ten days earlier my itinerary had looked fairly solid –

  • DY7131 – 09:50 GMT London Gatwick – Seattle 11:45 EST – 18 September

  • Big Creek Baldy Lookout, Kootenai National Forest, Montana – 21–25 September

  • Mars Desert Research Station – 2200 Cow Dung Road, Hanksville, Utah – ?

  Setting aside that I don’t drive and had no real plan for getting from Seattle to the lookout tower I’d rented in Kootenai National Forest, Montana – or the 900 miles south to Utah as the crow flies after that – things were in reasonable shape. All I needed was a ‘Yes’ from Mars, Utah – a green light to pitch up in their red desert. But then, a week before I was due to go, an email arrived from the National Park Service:

  Dear Mr Richards,

  This is an important message from Recreation.gov regarding your reservation at Big Creek Baldy Lookout Rental. We regret to inform you, that due to a fire in the area, the lookout will be closed from September 18th, through September 30th, 2017.

  Your reservation has been cancelled, and a full refund has been issued.

  . . . We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

  Sincerely,

  Blair

  Customer Support Representative

  Which was a bit of bugger, really, because that was one of the main reasons for my trip. So I was flying out to Seattle to see what happened and maybe trace Jack Kerouac’s 1956 journey north to Desolation Peak. This, ironically enough, had been my original intention at the start of the project, since I’d researched and written about some of Kerouac’s mountaintop experiences in Climbing Days – specifically his run-in with a bear – but then, fearing that the path to Desolation Peak was perhaps too well trodden, my sights moved towards Big Creek Baldy, partly because it was a tower-style lookout, raised on stilts like the fire-watch cabins of my imagination, partly for the name, but mainly because it was in the area of the Idaho Panhandle where the writer Denis Johnson livedi – a literary hero and the author of a book named Train Dreams.

  I was first put on to Denis Johnson by the staff at Mr B’s Bookshop in Bath. I was in the early planning stages of this book, a blank panicked state of mooching – browsing with a terrible furrowed intent – scouring the shelves for miraculous mulch to germinate vague ideas.

  In retrospect it was here that this book was really born – a realisation that my enthusiasm for the Alpine cabins I’d visited whilst climbing and writing my last could accumulate and meld with stories of other eyries and spartan architectures on the edge; a continuation of the more tangential reading I’d done for Climbing Days – Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tessen, Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. I told this to Nick and Ed behind the Mr B’s counter and they set about racking up a reading list.

  I mentioned Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler as the sort of book I had in mind, since I’d enjoyed his tales of a season fire-watching in the high Cascades, a summer spent eyespeeled for smoke and bears. Kerouac had been inspired to become a lookout by his friends Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, fellow Beat writers and belvedere vedettes, and the idea of a link from one book to the next – an echo of familiar mountain huts, the recommendation of friends – felt like a good place to begin.

  I left Mr B’s with several books, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson amongst them. Several things about it impressed me straight away, chiefly Bookseller Ed’s wild-eyed, almost manic passion for the author.

  The cover showed pale trees on a rusted steep overlaid with solid typography, white capitals akin to film titles –

  DENIS

  JOHNSON

  TRAIN

  DREAMS

  [THUNK.]

  ‘[A] love story, a hermit’s story . . . a small masterpiece. You will look up from the thing dazed, slightly changed.’

  NEW YORK TIMES

  It was also the shortest of the lot at 116 pages. I read it first, in one sitting. Then again immediately afterwards to check I was correct that it was the work of staggering brilliance I thought it was. Then again a week later to try to work out how he’d done it.

  In retrospect the clues were there even before I began reading – the filmic cover, the novella length reminiscent of catnip Simenon, the fact the New York Times had used the word thing to describe it – the myriad universal noun, manifestly more than just any old book – ‘You will look up from the thing dazed, slightly changed.’

  In short, Train Dreams is an epic in miniature and tells the story of a man, Robert Grainier, birth to death, a man born at the end of the nineteenth century who ‘had one lover . . . one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon . . . [had] never been drunk . . . never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone’.2

  Robert works in the American West, cutting timber for railroad tracks and then, when he’s too old for that, carting people’s possessions around the countryside. The book’s chronology is loose, or rather – as the writer Jonathan McAloon puts it – ‘Grainier’s whole life comes at us all at once.’3

  A life concentrated but effortlessly airy, panoramic in sweep but deeply personal and concerned with the specific –
this man, this life, this cabin, these woods; specific tragedy, recovery and transformation.

  I was utterly smitten.

  It made me want to light out after this America, these wilds, this author and so, hoping to immerse myself in the wildfire flood of Train Dreams, I found the nearest lookout to Grainier and Johnson’s world and booked a stay in Big Creek Baldy, a white cabin on stilts in a forest.ii

  Then, having dreamt of my crow’s nest week for five and a half months, I received that email ten days before my flight out – We regret to inform you that, due to a fire in the area, the lookout will be closed . . . – all of which perhaps begs the question whether the tower should have been decommissioned in the first place, but even before the veto I’d had the sense that I was chasing a shadow because Denis Johnson died in May. There would be no yatra down to Bonners Ferry with a vague address and a hopeful grin. He was nowhere to find now but in his books, so I packed my foxed copy of Train Dreams along with Lonesome Traveler and flew out of London with a hastily booked return ticket leaving New York on 6 October and no plan as to how I’d get to Desolation or Utah.

  I had nineteen days.

  —

  The immediate omens weren’t great.

  Shortly after take-off the screen in front of my seat began to tell me about Knud Rasmussen (7 June 1879 – 21 December 1933) – a fresh-faced Greenlandic/Danish polar explorer and anthropologist, the first European to cross the Northwest Passage by dog-sled: ‘father of Eskimology’.

  ‘Hero in focus’ ran the final screen of the series:

  Rasmussen died of pneumonia in 1933, contracted after he suffered a bout of food poisoning on the seventh Thule expedition.iii

  Righto, I thought, tucking into my inflight elevenses. Seventh time unlucky. Best avoid that then. No Thule tuck for me.

  A little later in the flight I drank a Spitsbergen pilsner, reassured that this is Arctic fare of a safer nature and buoyed by the cheerful story of the brewers, Robert and Oddvor, who, the can told me, started their friendship working together in Svalbard’s Mine 3 in 1982, have explored and shared adventures of many kinds through the years, and become friends for life. I found the fact that both Robert and Oddvor are still alive very cheering and enjoyed my beer all the better for that. Here’s to staying alive, I toasted them, then fell fast asleep.

  —

  The queues at Seattle airport were two hours long. Several planes seemed to have landed at once so we all shuffled and snaked along together, oscillating between sullen silence and forced cheerfulness. At passport check I was inspected by an enormous border security guard who silently scanned my passport before asking why I’d come.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ I said. ‘I’ve come here to write.’

  ‘What sort of writer?’

  ‘Travel?’ Realising that sounded a bit woolly, I added, ‘I write books. I’m here to write about your fire lookouts.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said the guard, raising his eyes and brightening slightly. ‘You can rent those, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, rallying also, ‘I’m planning to head up . . .’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve always wanted to do that, rent a place up in the mountains, but none of my friends want to . . . not a one . . .’ he gloomed back down at this point and I was half minded to assure him that I was bound to have a terrible time but by that point he’d returned my passport with an ‘Enjoy your stay’ so neutral as to be aggressively vicarious, and turned to frown at the next hopeful.

  —

  I was boarding in a neighbourhood named Fremont in the north of the city, rising beside the ship canal which connects lakes Union and Washington to the Puget Sound. I checked into a hostel, crammed my bags into a dorm locker and went for a walk to find coffee. The area is dominated by water and bridges – at the bottom of the hill is the deep blue double leaf Fremont Bridge which spans the Fremont Cut. Striding over everything is the massive Meccano of Aurora Bridge, cantilevering State Route 99 through the sky; the air full of engines. I found coffee and the barista topped my flat white unbidden with a milk froth skull. I felt confused and slightly hipsterediv as I sat and began texting everyone I knew in Seattle. This did not take long because there were two people I knew in Seattle and one of them turned out to actually live in Portland. Luckily my one Seattleite hope, Colin, was at a loose end and agreed to drive around Washington state and gallivant up a few mountains, so that was excellent.

  We arranged to meet at the hostel next morning and, emboldened, I began to email everyone I knew at the unresponsive Mars base in Utah . . .

  That evening, too wired to sleep, body-clock bewildered, but delighted to have Colin on board, I paused before the secondhand bookshop opposite my hostel. In the centre of the display was a book named Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering.4 On the cover was a photograph of my great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, climbing in the Montana Rockies in 1926.v

  I stood on the sidewalk regarding the book for several minutes before crossing the street to go to bed. I couldn’t begin to fathom the chances of her being here to meet me – the subject of my last book encouraging me on to the adventures of the next. This surely augurs incredibly well, I remember thinking in my bunk. I must be on the right track.

  —

  Two nights later and I’m walking with Colin in the Snoqualmie National Forest. It’s pitch black and raining. We’re both drenched and Colin’s phone has died. Actually it’s wrong to say we’re in the forest because we’re actually above it, above the tree-line but zig-zagging down towards its deep mass having visited a stumpy tower-style lookout as a dry run for Desolation Peak.

  That morning we’d hired a Jeep and driven to Colin’s storage locker in Newcastle, south of Seattle, to dig out his walking boots, waterproofs and sleeping bag. That afternoon we headed southeast down Highway 90 towards North Bend, arriving at the foot of Granite Mountain in pallid sunshine shortly after 3 p.m. – or maybe 4. We started up it, first a gentle well-trodden path in the shadow of giant cedars, then a smaller stony switchbacking track covered in the gnarled roots of tenacious trees and shrubs keyed into the mountain now growing sparse and steep, the path cliffedged so one side was thin air.

  Since we’d agreed that this would be a proper ‘practice climb’ for the real thing later in the week, we pressed on into the thickening drizzle. This obviously makes no sense now, but at the time it felt like the right thing to do. My map, like most else, was sodden but definitely suggested that there wasn’t much further to go. It was now five or maybe six. We met a lady on her way down who was wearing shorts and enormous socks rolled down so they resembled rubber quoits. She said it wasn’t far and warned us about the wind on the ridge. We thanked her and carried on up. Later, having experienced not a jot of wind, I would remember the lady in the doughnut socks and wonder why she hadn’t mentioned the knee-deep snow I was tromping through, but hey ho. Later – let’s say it was seven o’clock – we stood below the dark shuttered tower of the Granite Mountain Lookout in silence. Dusk was falling, as were large flakes of snow. Summit visibility was minimal. The few trees around us were hunched blueish. A sign on the tower informed us that we were on camera. Well, lah-di-dah, I thought, and took a picture of Colin, who flashed a weary smile – strained but still game. Then we began the crunch back down.

  A couple of hours later, who really knows when, the night was loud with water.

  Trees streamed unseen beyond my phone’s halo, my hood was drumming, the trail was awash, our boots were slurping. It had become clear that Colin and I could walk for hours in relative silence – always a good thing and often the best way of avoiding unpleasantness. I don’t know what Colin was thinking as we tramped in step but I was musing on the thin line between climbing Granite Mountain and everything going well and climbing Granite Mountain and it being a Stygian shower. Everything would have been okay had we started an hour or two earlier and brought some chocolate and a torch. As it was we were descending at a fair lick through a precipitous forest in t
he dark by the light of my iPhone.

  It all had an irksome feeling of déjà vu. This had happened to me in a fashion before – but at least this time I had a working phone and we were below the snow-line. I’m getting better at this, I rallied, this is not entirely awful. Thank goodness I’d cack-handedly smashed my phone en route to Iceland and had to buy a weatherproof cover to hold the screen together, so I now had a rubberised torch to guide us down this mountain. Excellent slice of luck. I felt quite chipper. But other misgivings about the situation now crept in – the main being whether Colin’s silence behind me might be due to rage; had the fact that I’d written a book about mountaineering lulled him into a false sense of security . . . Had he read the book? Had he seen the cover quote which said it was a miracle I lived to tell the tale? Was he aware that its two recurrent refrains were ‘Bad in life, good in the book’ and ‘Still not dead!’?

  He hadn’t read the book, I decided.

  His silence was a mix of hypothermia, confusion, and betrayal.

  But as preparation for Desolation Peak this had been worthwhile. We would not do this sort of thing this way again, if Colin agreed to do any such thing again at all.

  Reminded of the Cascades, I began to mull an article I’d recently read on the New York Times website about a writer who’d hiked up Desolation and met the lookout there – a Marine reservist who’d served two tours of duty in Iraq. The man is frank about the fact he hasn’t read any Kerouac, he’s tried a couple of times – the cabin had a shelf of his books left by Beat pilgrims, apparently – but no, he can’t get on with him: ‘Me and that guy just don’t see eye-to-eye.’ Then the article’s author lays into Kerouac a bit to boot – I mean, fair enough, we’ve all done it; I’m going to do it in a few pages’ time – but it raised the question of who we’d encounter when we reached the top of the mountain because, of all the places I was going for this book, Desolation Peak was perhaps the riskiest in terms of who I’d meet when I got there – the big difference between Big Creek Baldy and Desolation Peak being that the latter observation post was still manned and in service. I knew there would be one person sat on top of the mountain. We were going to hike up to their cabin and it would be complete pot-luck whether they’d be an enthusiast and welcome us or a taciturn jobsworth and, well . . . We’ll see, I thought, in the streaming woods as we neared our Jeep and the sounds of the highway swelled.