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receded from my view, I couldn't see them any more but now I was beginning to feel
them more.
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In an old tavern I saw an old decrepit man who could hardly move around to
get me a beer behind the bar, I thought "I'd rather die in a glacial cave than in an
eternity afternoon room of dust like this." A Min V Bill couple left me off at a grocery
store in Sauk and there I got my final ride from a mad drunk fastswerving dark
lorig-sideburned guitar-playing Skagit Valley wrangler who came to a dusty flying stop
at the Marblemount Ranger Station and had me home.
The assistant ranger was standing there watching. "Are you Smith?"
"Yeah."
"That a friend of yours?"
"No, just a ride he gave me."
And he wasn't afraid of nobody, he'd just come right out with it. That's what I like, cause when the time comes
when a man can't say whatever he pleases I guess that'll be when I'm gonna go up in the backcountry and finish
my life out in a lean-to. One thing about Japhy, though, wherever he'll be all the resta his life, I don't care how
old he gets, he'll always have a good time." Burnie was about sixty-five and really spoke very paternally about
Japhy. Some of the other kids also remembered Japhy and wondered why he wasn't back. That night, because it
was Burnie's fortieth anniversary in the Forest Service, the other rangers voted him a gift, which was a
brand new big leather belt. Old Burnie was always having trouble with belts and was wearing a kind of cord
at the time. So he put on his new belt and said something funny about how he'd better not eat too much and
everybody applauded and cheered. I figured
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Burnie and Japhy were probably the two best men that had ever worked in this
country.
After Fire School I spent some time hiking up the mountains in back of the Ranger
Station or just sitting by the rushing Skagit with my pipe in my mouth and a bottle of
wine between my crossed legs, afternoons and also moonlit nights, while the other kids
went beering at local carnivals. The Skagit River at Marblemount was a rushing clear
snowmelt of pure green; above, Pacific Northwest pines were shrouded in clouds; and
further beyond were peak tops with clouds going right through them and then fitfully
the sun would shine through. It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of
purity at my feet. The sun shined on the roils, fighting snags held on. Birds scouted
over the water looking for secret smiling fish that only occasionally suddenly leaped
flying out of the water and arched their backs and fell in again into water that rushed
on and obliterated their loophole, and everything was swept along. Logs and snags
came floating down at twenty-five miles an hour. I figured if I should try to swim across
the narrow river I'd be a half-mile downstream before I kicked to the other shore. It
was a river wonderland, the emptiness of the golden eternity, odors of moss and bark
and twigs and mud, all ululating mysterious visionstuff before my eyes, tranquil and
everlasting nevertheless, the hillhairing trees, the dancing sunlight. As I looked up the
clouds assumed, as I assumed, faces of hermits. The pine boughs looked satisfied
washing in the waters. The top trees shrouded in gray fog looked content. The jiggling
sunshine leaves of Northwest breeze seemed bred to rejoice. The upper snows on the
horizon, the trackless, seemed cradled and warm. Everything was everlastingly loose
and responsive, it was all everywhere be-
Time came finally for me to be packed up into my mountain. I bought forty-five
dollars' worth of groceries on credit in the little Marblemount grocery store and we
packed that in the truck, Happy the muleskinner and I, and drove on up the river to
Diablo Dam. As we proceeded the Skagit got narrower and more like a torrent, finally it
was crashing over rocks and being fed by side-falls of water from heavy timbered shores,
it was getting wilder and craggier all the time. The Skagit River was dammed back at
Newhalem, then again at Diablo Dam, where a giant Pittsburgh-type lift took you up on
a platform to the level of Diablo Lake. There'd been a gold rush in the 1890S in this
country, the prospectors had built a trail through the solid rock cliffs of the gorge
between Newhalem and what was now Ross Lake, the final dam, and dotted the
drainages of Ruby Creek, Granite Creek, and Canyon Creek with claims that never
paid off. Now most of this trail was under water anyway. In 1919 a fire had raged in the
Upper Skagit and all the country around Desolation, my mountain, had burned and
burned for two months and filled the skies of northern Washington and British
Columbia with smoke that blotted out the sun. The government had tried to fight it,
sent a thousand men in with pack string supply lines that then took three weeks from
Marblemount fire camp, but only the fall rains had stopped that blaze and the charred
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snags, I was told, were still standing on Desolation Peak and in some valleys. That was
the reason for the name: Desolation.
"Boy," said funny old Happy the muleskinner, who still wore his old floppy cowboy
hat from Wyoming days and rolled his own butts and kept making jokes, "don't be like
the kid we had a few years ago up on Desolation, we took him up there and he was the
greenest kid I ever saw, I packed him into his lookout and he tried to fry an egg for
supper and broke it and missed the friggin fryingpan and missed the stove and it
landed on his boot, he didn't know whether to run shit or go blind and when I left I told
him not to flog his damn dummy too much and the sucker says to me 'Yes sir, yes
sir.'"
"Well I don't care, all I want is to be alone up there this summer."
"You're sayin that now but you'll change your tune soon enough. They all talk brave.
But then you get to talkin to yourself. That ain't so bad but don't start anywerin
yourself, son." Old Happy drove the pack mules on the gorge trail while I rode the boat
from Diablo Dam, to the foot of Ross Dam where you could see immense dazzling
openings of vistas that showed the Mount Baker National Forest mountains in wide
panorama around Ross Lake that extended shiningly all the way back to Canada. At
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