Outpost Read online

  —

  That evening, back at the Fremont hostel, we hoisted ourselves up into our bunks and went straight to sleep. At least, I did. Colin, poor fellow, woke repeatedly with loud terrors. Next morning he explained that he tends to have a nightcap before he goes to bed to stave his nightmares off . . . But he was looking forward to our trip into the mountains, he enthused, because . . . to be honest I can’t remember why. The rest of the conversation is a blank because I’d become distracted by a thought, a thought which began to cycle around my mind to the tune of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’: ‘Sleeping in a tent with a screaming man, screaming man, screaming man; Sleeping in a tent with a screaming man . . . up a mountain surrounded by bears.’

  —

  We approached the Cascade mountains on Highway 99, the same route as Jack Kerouac hitched in June 1956. His description of the drive in ‘Alone on a Mountaintop’ is windshield filmic and the dreamy panoramic excitement he relates – the flow of the landscape past and through you, melting molten, bunched and abstract at the edges – was very much our ride too. Kerouac was following the lead of his friend Gary Snyder – a well-liked former Cascades lookout of several seasons’ experience on Sourdough mountain – who had written him a long and detailed letter explaining what to expect and look out for en route, at the Forest Service HQ at Marblemount and once ensconced on Desolation Peak.5

  I felt an escalating thrill as we left the main highway and sped east along SR 20, the Cascades rising on the northeast horizon as the sun began to sink in the west. Kerouac hails Mount Baker by its indigenous Lummi name of Komo Kulshan, which roughly translates to ‘white sentinel with puncture wound’ – a reference to its volcanic crater which gives its head a twin summit look.vi

  At Burlington you turn right and head for the heart of the mountains along a rural valley road through sleepy little towns and one bustling agricultural market center known as Sedro Woolley with hundreds of cars parked aslant on a typical country-town Main Street of hardware stores, grain-and-feed stores and five-and-tens.6

  Again, the time-lapsed comparison – Kerouac’s then, ours now. For us it was dusk and warm. We stopped in Sedro Woolley, parked aslant in a quiet street to use a cash machine – there was no bustle a block back from the fluorescent junctions of State Routes 9 and 20. We left the town in early evening and the great peaks which were covered with trackless white for Kerouac loomed grey green for us, seeming to hesitate and recede as twilight knocked them back blue until, as the sun set behind us, they caught and kindled into alpenglow so red, so hot and vivid that the mountains looked ablaze.

  I’d always pictured Kerouac’s approach as being an assured swoop to his lookout post, arrowing up the timbered valleys, the Skagit River, over the Ross Dam and up the lake to Desolation, but read again on the drive it seemed more of a slog achieved in fits and starts. I’d thought of it as an opening out but now I saw it first hand as a tapering down; barns and fields both becoming less frequent and valleys V’ed, the roads becoming the road, route options dwindling as the formerly loaf-like mountains became more numerous and began piling in – not so massive in height as massive in mass – huge green brutes, each on the shoulder of the next; the river faster, whiter. Nature taking over, the landscape beginning to bite.

  —

  Which brings me back to bears.

  I think that I must first have read about Kerouac’s Desolation Peak stint whilst at school, or maybe art school. I definitely knew he’d had a run-in with a bear because when a Swiss fox rifled my tent in the Alps and sloped off with my milk – I thought, Hello, this rings a bell . . . and so I went back and compared the dairy-based larceny of ‘Alone on a Mountaintop’ with my own:

  One morning I found bear stool and signs of where the monster had taken a can of frozen milk and squeezed it in his paws and bit into it with one sharp tooth trying to suck out the paste.

  Kerouac stared down into the foggy dawn, down the mysterious Ridge of Starvation ‘with its fog-lost firs and its hills humping into invisibility’, aware that somewhere in that fog there stalked a bear. He imagined all the attributes and stories of the bear, its life and times: ‘He was Avalokiteśvara the Bear, and his sign was the grey wind of autumn.’

  He waits for the bear’s return. It never comes.7

  I enjoyed all that and the image of writing at the top of a fairly accessible mountain appealed to me, since the book I was then writing involved climbing to the top of several famously inaccessible mountains and then getting back down and writing about them later. If nothing else, I reckoned, this could be a time-saving exercise.

  —

  Kerouac had dreamt of writing in a backwoods shack for years, the idea becoming entwined whilst a teenager with notions of what it meant to be a writer. Get to Thy Hermitage! he scribbled in his journal on Thanksgiving night, New York, 1954. But no such thing happened until he met Snyder and Whalen, for, as well as constantly oscillating between a desire for companionship and an equal and opposite need for solitude, he seems to have lacked the practical application to turn his ideas into a reality. A plan to build a shed behind his sister’s house came to nothing, in fact he seems to have grown rather panicked by his own idea – ‘What do I know about deserts? Water? – Where shall I go to escape this civilisation which at any moment may thrust me in jail or war or madhouse? A shack in the woods outside Rocky Mount, be near family? – what of the gnats, heat, tics, mosquitoes, disapproval?’8

  So he kept roving, pitching up and moving on, until October 1955 when, back in San Francisco after a time writing down in Mexico, he became enthused and persuaded of the paid possibilities a couple of months fire-watching might afford him. John Suiter’s book Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades9 is a great primer for the way these pre-eminent Beats came to inhabit and chronicle their roosts, the boondock dais of the fire lookouts forging them as nature writers almost by default.

  On Friday, 7 October 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, five poets – Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen – gave a reading of new work. The Gallery Six Reading, as it would become known, is mainly celebrated as the first time Ginsberg performed ‘Howl’ – which he began carefully, slowly, before picking up locomotion and momentum, his lines spilling out and striving the length of a breath:

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .10

  Kerouac was in the audience – having been invited but declining to read – fortified, mesmerised and urging Ginsberg on – Yeah! Go! Go! Go! – in the manner of a saucer-eyed fan in the bleachers.

  In the aftermath of ‘Howl’, audience and poets giddy alike, Snyder read ‘A Berry Feast’, a poem in praise of Coyote, a Native American trickster myth infused with Buddhist ideas of impermanence. The poem traces the destruction of forests to build suburban houses – ‘boxes to catch the biped in’. It looks forward to a time when people are gone, and ends with the image of Coyote surveying an abandoned city gone back to seed – ‘Dead city in dry summer, / Where berries grow.’

  After the readings Kerouac quizzed Snyder and Whalen about their time in the mountain wilds, asking how he could follow in their footsteps. Recently met, all three were practising Buddhists at various stages in their literary and spiritual journeys, with Snyder shortly to depart for Japan to undergo formal training as a Zen monk. In a letter to Jack, a few months after Gallery Six, he describes lookout life in the sort of elliptical aphoristic terms which define so many of the Buddhist sutras – fire-watching, he writes, requires ‘physical and mental toughness’ whilst also allowing ‘vast leisure’ – words that would come back to haunt Jack during his sixty-three days alone as he became pretty crazed pretty quickly with too much time t
o think and only himself for company.

  By the tenth day of his stay in the Desolation eyrie he’d run out of tobacco and was smoking coffee grounds; by the end of his tour he had rooted out and read every single piece of mouse-chewed paper in the attic, invented several imaginary friends and begun playing poker with them.

  Where Snyder and Whalen had been the big eyes and big ears, opened out, looking, listening, meditating, Kerouac struggled to live in the moment and felt strangely strained and afraid.

  In the middle of the night I woke up suddenly and my hair was standing on end – I saw a huge black shadow in my window. – Then I saw that it had a star above it, and realized that this was Mt Hozomeen (8080 feet) looking in my window from miles away near Canada. – I got up from the forlorn bunk with the mice scattering underneath and went outside and gasped to see black mountain shapes gianting all around, and not only that but the billowing curtains of the northern lights shifting behind the clouds. – It was a little too much for a city boy – the fear that the Abominable Snowman might be breathing behind me in the dark sent me back to bed where I buried my head inside my sleeping bag.11

  This is played for laughs of course, but the mystic loner is a central figure and theme in almost all of Kerouac’s books; Zen bebop man-cub hobo exploring the great beyond.vii But the hermit’s joy he later hymned wasn’t his experience on Desolation, at least not very often. He had flashes of it but his notebooks and letters of the time make plain that he suffered, pined and gnawed his way through the sixty-three days in a way reminiscent of one of Denis Johnson’s addicts attempting cold turkey – fumbling at the monastic, striving for the ascetic, trying to remake himself closer to heaven – but writing a lot, albeit crazed and haunted by the void.

  In Fire Season, Philip Connors lists the enduring qualifications and qualities needed to be a wilderness lookout based on his own experience and the writings and reminiscences of ‘Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, and Norman Maclean’ –

  • Not blind, deaf, or mute – must be able to see fires, hear the radio, respond when called

  • Capability for extreme patience while waiting for smokes

  • One good arm to cut wood

  • Two good legs for hiking to a remote post

  • Ability to keep oneself amused

  • Tolerance for living in proximity to rodents

  • A touch of pyromania, though only of the nonparticipatory variety12

  Jack Kerouac’s name tops Connors’s roll-call. Kerouac: the fire-watch poster boy who ticks about half of that list. Kerouac who, in Connors’s words, mined Desolation for two novels, The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, but I don’t think he ever really let it go. He reworked the experience repeatedly in retrospect, trying to make it right, anxious to retrofit resolution and significance.

  I imagine him sat up there at night, sadly bemused that he wasn’t enjoying his post; that he seemed so temperamentally unsuited to his task; this pillar-saint position he felt he ought to be owning. Gazing over the dark gulf at the horned shadow of Hozomeen, rubbing his eyes, refocusing on his own face in the black mirrors of the glass. Very much alone on his mountaintop, his cross – less sage than martyr. A still night and cold. Hard cold. Stars unknown. The radio is silent; no fire or light for miles but his own – the potbelly stove all purr and tick. He’s wrapped up, hunched over his desk, pencil scratching, mice skittering, bugs tapping at the lamp, cigarette smoke pooling in the green cabin eaves – the cigarettes he radioed a plea for two weeks in, hangdog and sheepish. Talking to himself as he walked down the trail past all the trees and plants he couldn’t name, a couple of hours back to the lake where the Ross Dam ranger boat was waiting with coffee and cigarettes – company and conversation. They took him round the lake with them, a night back on the float, a ham steak dinner, then they dropped him back to the trail head, one pound tin of Prince Albert tobacco under his arm, feeling better but also like he’d failed, been humoured. Back up to the summit. City boy. Couldn’t do without smokes, couldn’t do on his own. He’d dreamt of this for years and he was fucking it up . . . ‘no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me.’13viii

  But the bit with the bear was good so here we were, the latest pilgrims to follow Kerouac up the road to Diablo; driving in the dark towards Marblemount, the mountains rearing around and above us having long since faded from red embers to charcoal silhouettes. After Concrete, a town Kerouac pegged as the last in the Skagit Valley with a bank and a five-and-ten, the Cascades closed to hang in our peripheries; monstering from the wings.

  —

  We arrived at Marblemount in darkness. The gas station was lit up like a close encounter. Opposite was a diner named The Buffalo. Dazzled, we slowed and pulled into the lot. A mile before we’d passed a green sign, LAST SERVICES FOR 74 MILES. This was the last place to eat and find a room. We hadn’t booked anywhere nor eaten since breakfast. The Buffalo looked a good bet. We went in.

  ‘Evening, boys,’ said the man behind the counter. An old guy with a mass of bristly hair. He was tall and wearing dungarees – just the sort of guy to run a brass tacks diner named The Buffalo. ‘You eating?’ he asked. At his elbow was a glass cabinet full of different pies. Behind him a grill was sizzling. Several tables of silent men were busy eating down the way. Roy Orbison was playing, ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’.

  We would like to eat, we said, could he sort us out with a room as well? He could! This guy would do us a deal. He was a deal-making kinda guy. He quoted us a price then did us a deal on that, knocking a few bucks off. One night, sure, no problem, he’d beds. He ran the motel too, he told us, beyond the arc-eye garage. He’d take us over in a bit, sign here, and this guy would fix up the wifi as soon as he was done eating. He was the wifi guy. One of the silent men looked up and nodded greeting.

  Blindsided by this blunderbuss hospitality, grateful but suddenly dog tired, we signed and paid. It all sounded very good, particularly the bed bit. ‘Now food!’ said the owner of the town. ‘Better order quick, boys, because it’s 8.45 and at nine this place is dead. D.E.D. Ded.’

  That’s verbatim. The most American thing ever said. I wrote it down as soon as we were sat at a table. Shortly after that some drinks arrived and then some burgers too. We’d been pressed to have the burgers. The burgers were good. ‘Damn fine burgers and big!’ My God, the bristly man could talk. And sell. And we’d been sold. But numb nodding had got us a bed and a buffalo burger . . . and possibly wifi as well.

  —

  Next morning we drove to the Wilderness Information Center, handily located down Ranger Station Road, to sort out backcountry permits and collect a bear canister; not, as my mother thought, a canister for the bears – as if the plan was to beckon them over then buy them off with buns and honey – but a sturdy drum to store food away from our tent so hangry bears wouldn’t come a’sniffing after dark.

  Colin asked the ranger whether we needed bear repellent. The ranger said probably not. My attitude was to get up there and see what happened. The idea of pepper spraying a bear didn’t really appeal, it seemed a surefire way of making an inquisitive bear angry and an already angry bear apoplectic . . . but I respected the fact that Colin was worried about the bears and, again, wondered whether cajoling him into Twin Peaks territory and dark forests at night where, apparently, mountain lions as well as bears were known to pad was a good idea conducive to sound sleep. My friend Stanley has a theory that all our deepest fears stem from the dark forests and caves inhabited by early man. Our motel stay the night before had been all right – no shouting, just a bit of muffled howling – but we weren’t up in the dark woods yet . . . All the same, I was glad we weren’t packing pepper spray. I didn’t mention the lions.

  We gave the duty ranger our planned itinerary and booked ourselves a tent berth atop Desolation– the only people due up there that night. He gave us a couple of useful maps of Ross Lake trails and suggested spots where we might camp on the walk back – Dev
il’s Creek, Lightning and Rainbow Point; the sort of places where mysterious things happen in Enid Blyton novels. A burn ban was in effect so we couldn’t light campfires; no problem we said, of course.

  Kerouac spent a week at the Marblemount Ranger Station in 1956 attending fire school before moving up to Ross Lake. At night, after dinner, he took to sitting alone down by the swift swirling Skagit with a bottle of wine, writing in his notebook – ‘drinking to the sizzle of the stars’.14

  We followed the Skagit up to Newhalem – a company town owned by Seattle City Light and populated entirely by employees of either the hydroelectric company or government agencies so, unless you work for the Dam Man or The Man, you can’t stay. Until 1940 the town was only accessible by train, an outpost born of the necessity to build dams to slake Seattle’s growing thirst for electricity. The first, Gorge Dam, was up and running by 1924, and the grand grey powerhouse – solid, industrial Deco – still stands over the Skagit, spun water foaming out from underneath, 500 kV three-phase electric power flowing back over our heads on lines carried high by pylons.

  The Diablo Dam followed Gorge in 1927, four miles back up the green walled pass. The railway was pushed further into the Cascades, ending at the foot of Sourdough Mountain against which the gigantic new bulwark was to be set. So steep was the gorge at this point that a massive inclined plane was built to lift loaded freight cars broadside up the mountain to where they could be shunted along a short level track and unloaded at the head of what was then the tallest dam in the world.