Chapter-- 

We finally left the place and went outside. It was nearly dark and we walked down Ashby Avenue until we came to a hamburger stand.

"All this talking has gotten me tired, let's stop for awhile."

The little stand was painted white and had a place covered with a cloth roof and heated with good heaters. It was comfortable. He kept looking around expecting to see someone he knew. There were a group of people talking, salesmen, jabbering about some new age practice that they were taking. And a greybeard guy talking to a young woman about poetry and how to perform it in front of people. My friend slumped against the brick wall of the stand and stared off while I munched away. I didn't distrub him in his thoguhts.

I will say this writer. (And you are so kind to stick around and listen to an old friend. It is really good to see you.)

It was not all sweetness and light. There were people there who lived in a kind of penitence. I can remember one conversation, in particular, that I had months after I had been in the mountains. He was small in stature with this wild black beard and black hair. He would work hard in the field, breathing hard and jabbing his spade into the earth as if he were looking for something. I noticed that he would only speak when spoken to and would avoid eye contact with me. We had an opportunity one day to talk. It happened this way: We were sent to buy some supplies in a town about 15 miles away. He drove. He seemed nervous. "So what did you do before you came up here?" He asked. I told him. There was a long silence. The road was an old horse path the county had lately paved over and the truck made it down stealthy like. I had wanted to get splendid scenes of the mountain and stream but the man wanted to talk. "Think you'll stay a year?" I told him that it was possible. A year seemed a long time during those days. A year? May as well have been ten thousand years. I finally asked him what he'd done for a living.

"I did many things I was ashamed of doing. Time has given me distance but I don't like talking about what I did."

This struck me as par for the course for the people of the mountain and didn't follow up. But there was tension. And when I felt tension I always spoke. "One single thing? Was it one thing you did?"

"Yeah, one specific, single thing that has changed everything. It made me understand the evil in my own spirit. Before I was glib about evil, ah the world is evil but not I. That was my thinking. I revealed the darkness in myself. And I was smiling the whole time! Can you imagine? I did something totally opposite my common sense. It perverted my integrity and virtue but I did smile the whole time as if it were another daily task."

"But you won't tell me what it is?"

"No, never, no one knows but the God I give me conscience to. He has judged me and lifted my guilt so I don't feel any need to confess. I tell you it was a terrible thing to do."

"Well, could you tell me why you did it?"

"I can only say this. If a man isn't rooted in the conscience, if he isn't rooted there he is. His body becomes an instrument the world manipulates at its will. The pressure to do this is immense. Haven't you felt it? Every word and gesture confirms it."

"What made you see this?"

"I had a fit of profound shame. Weeping. The innocent faces of children. The blight of the city I was living in. I hated and loved it but ended up hating more than loving. Another bad rock was added to the pile.

He had a hint of violence in him but it passed.

"Never follow your first dream, that's all I can say. If you follow your first dream you'll be destroyed by the world, taken in by its shabby temptations. Break that first dream down through an act of some kind. And then recover and learn. This is what the mountain provides; a place to recover and learn."

"Do you think you'll return to the city?"

"Only if I have the resources."

He took a hand off the steering wheel and pulled out a tattered paperback book and threw it on my lap. It was on the politics of technology.

"This book is teaching me quite a bit. I'm re-learning many things. I was oblivious for a long time. I didn't read, not even the newspaper since it all made sense in a crazy way. Every event reported in the paper I could understand, even war, murder, political scandal, every bit of violence and evil I saw there."

The man stopped talking. Someone had told me he had Indian blood. I had met women with Indian blood but few men. He seemed on the verge of tears. His face suddenly became very expressive.

"...but I felt it was all my fault somehow. But I couldn't control it. Couldn't control any of it."

About that time the truck went up a little rise and when it leveled out I saw the little town with its gleaming tin roofs and old cars and old signs come into view.

This town was filled with obnoxious people who believed in themselves. I know when I first walked the streets they stared at me as though I was some lost relative who had gained a bad reputation. We stopped at a small restaurant to get something to eat and I heard a mother whisper into her daughter's ear, "he's a sensitive, slick one that guy is..." It was bright daylight and we went to get supplies. They knew -----------, most of the proprietors but he never introduced me. I was put aside and silently picked up the sacks and tools and put them in the truck. I spotted one man, a rancher type with a big hat walking down the street with cow shit all over his shoes. One solitary guy walking down the street like that makes an impression.

The popular media had it wrong again. Small towns were not full of kind, naive people but filled with nasty, paranoid types who waited, nearly frozen in hostile thoughts, for the stranger to leave.

It was as though the stuffing had been kicked out of these towns and everyone left but the resentful old. The young could not make a living but by cultivating dope and selling it, the young women got pregnant early and were taken down to the welfare department by their mothers to begin collecting what would be a long line of checks. The old knew it was all bleak, lived in memories and waited for everything to leave the good Earth. Not that I had any pity for them. I learned later that most of the industries that had supported the town such as lumber had moved out. It wasn't the people's fault that the world moved away as it did. But it left a lot of bad feelings hovering over everything.

"Everything moves away from the center," someone explained to me. "And then many battles are fought for new centers. And when those are settled everything moves away from them." Ah, that explained it I thought to myself. The fact is I spent some time gathering information about these towns in the mountain valleys and found them to be what everything used to be. That's what people wanted for the most part, to build a place out of the woods so the neighbor was only a feint ax sound away. I thought, 'what was the modern rebellion about anyway if not the loss of old ways, the steamroller effect of the modern world?' So it was natural that people who felt the sting the most would move from the center, out to the old, dormant centers in the rural mountains and valleys.

I had assumed that the old towners were resentful of the young coming in but many were not. They welcomed the young, even the new sources of income such as marijuana growing. "Send it all down to the cities so they destroy themselves." I didn't hear anyone actually say that but I could read it in them from time to time.

Our interactions with the towners depended on the circumstance. A lot depended on what you were taking in a manner and speaking and what you were giving.

It didn't pass me by that maybe these towners were the normal people and we, young whippersnappers par excellance, were a new and bizarre sprout from an old human seed destined to slink back to the old people, their guns and paranoia, their stale art but wonderfully free, wounded minds. And make no mistake, once the towners saw me with the group they had me pegged and I could do nothing to shake it. I did get to know this old guy, a drunk, who knew a lot about the stock market. We used to sit in his trailer and talk numbers for quite awhile. One time when he was roaring drunk he made me get into his old truck and off we went through the rural roads driving like a maniac until we came to a hillside. He kept pointing up and I saw a fire watch built up on the hill. "Go climb those steps over there and I'll be with you shortly." I did it and when I reached the top a guy unlatched a door and I climbed into his little nest. "You with Bart?" "Yeah, he wanted to bring me up here." "Is he drunk?" "Yeah." "Ok." So in about five minutes he tells me that the guy is a multimillionaire and used his trailer to get away from his wife who didn't want him to drink. "I think his family caused his drinking but I don't know. He's a good guy when you get to know him. Smart in the brain that hasn't been damaged so far by the drink. Reads good books. I've seen them."

So the multimillionaire joined us at the top, laughed, shook hands and sat on a small bed the nest contained. The tower was enclosed by windows all around so he could see the whole valley for hundreds of miles. He had a rack of paperback books, field glasses, a hot plate and various boxes. On the center table was a green topographical map with a magnfying glass and compass.

"Did I ever tell you how Jesus was impotent," Bart suddenly blurted out.

"I've heard it more than once," the firewatch replied.

"It was the impotence that put him on the road to preach. He had no honey to marry, don't you see?" And the man leaned back and roared a drunken laugh and upset the stillness of the wonderful nest and the splendid views 360 degrees in every direction. We felt some awkwardness and then the firewatch showed me his daily ritual.

I couldn't agree with his theory and laughed it off. Who knows these things? I had faith in the unknowable and waited for all the unknowables to become tangible facts.

"A fire up here is it's own self-created beast. It consumes the very air and turns it into cinder. It's an awesome thing to see. You have to respect it and give it its due even as you fight it to death. I see them in their seedling state and call it in. I've seen some I've called in catch a new wind and get into the news."

By the time we left the firewatch the multimillionaire had become somber and pensive. "I wish I'd have a job like that. Everytime I tried to get a job my mother would step in and pay me off. She didn't want me to be a working guy."

I was an educated working guy and couldn't help but feel that the poor old drunk realized too late that he was never in control of his life. Every man wishes to be rich but the men who get rich turn out to be wretched. I could see that especially coming from the farm where money was held in contempt, blamed for all the world's problems and so on. Yet, I wonder how many of them would have taken a maternal bribe to go get some normalcy. When I left the millionaire he was cracking an egg into a glass, then another, and a third and then swallowing the whole concoction. I winced and then left. I never saw the man again.

When I think long and hard on it I wanted to shake the rural folk up, get them out of their torpor. They had a weird habit of looking as if they knew everything to know. It was in the stubborn crags in their faces. And to try and penetrate that worn face would be met by laughter or a tight sort of scorn. And after that they'd have nothing to do with you. It pained me because so much of my own came from the rural country and their adaption to the modern world was like people absorbed by conquest that they finally resolved with. "We are alive and have our pleasures, why worry?" And there was a lot of mutual aid that used to be commended in my anarchist books. The crux of it is you can't change people. They are little momuments sanded down by time before a brief wind swooshes them off to lord knows where. My people. They fought in the Civil War and came out for gold. I am from them but never felt of them if you know what I mean.

David Eide
January 24, 2014