| the golden west volume 1 part 2 - 1994 august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
2nd August I've set the alarm for 4:30. The car is packed. 3rd What kind of day is it, dark still. I was next to the bathroom window putting down the deodorant stone, and there was a gigantic CRACK so near so loud right on top of the white fluorescent second of grass and fence boards in the alley. Storm over, half an hour later. A fresh smell blows in through the window. 5 o'clock news about to come on. I'll put on my pants and go down in the dark. Spences Bridge 4th There's my car, the axe handle propping the trunk. It is standing next to a pine tree whose bark in its cracks is orange. The upper slope of the hill beyond it is touched by a filtered pink light that is strengthening imperceptibly so that if I look away and look back there is more color in the drifts of sage. It is unity of color that is the beauty of this place. Where there is a cut bank or a trail the dirt is a shade of grey-brown that could not be more right for sage green, dry-grass buff, pine green, cottonwood green and silver. Cache Creek Getting onto the highway yesterday morning realizing I wasn't ready, struggling to concentrate. Something that is immediately terrifying (bridges and tunnels too), something I realized is subliminally terrifying, is tight bends where oncoming traffic is hurtling straight at me for a second, trucks one after another, headlights, wind rush, motor roar, combined speed 110 miles an hour. Something even more subliminal, black tire marks that seem to be everpresent moments of danger written on the road. Chilcotin Lodge, Riske Creek 5th Walking above the valley this morning hearing this:
Jean yesterday. There was her house, the apron of heat it has in front of its front door. I thought she might be sleeping but I heard her moving inside. Saw her with her back turned, as I knocked, across the room sweeping slowly. She is old but big, a big loose body, big mottled legs she shows halfway up the thigh when she lounges on the couch, breasts slung loose at the waist, thin hair that shows comb lines, a white cowlick. Sit, she says. She's a good welcomer. I'm very glad to see you, she'll say whether she is or not. She understands that she needs people, she'll keep lines open. I know what I've come to see her for, and I guess she will be interested. You have stars in your eyes when you talk about him, she says. I knew it would evoke Ronald, and she is always wanting to make him real again. Is he good looking? she wants to know. It is later when we've been talking about men for an hour. When he's in a good mood, he shines, I say, When he's in a bad mood he has a neurotic twitch like this, he's quite ugly but I still like to look at him. Oh you're more tolerant than I am, she says, I'd be annoyed. I used to be like that, but with him, when he's ugly - and then I found myself halting, tearful, looking across the room away from her - I would still see the humanness in him. I needed a blessing for that love and thought she was the one who'd recognize it. "I fell in love with an Englishman." "Can he do things? Can he fix motors and so on? That's the kind of man I like. The kind of man I like has something I call wildness. Like an animal." This one is very wild, I say. I think you'd like him. He's manly. He carries himself well. How did you get yours, I ask. Oh I had an unbeatable advantage, he hadn't had anyone to talk to about books for ten years. I tried that, it didn't work. I think I didn't do it well enough. I don't believe that, she said. But "talk to about books" means something different with her than it naturally would for me. "A man wants to talk. He wants to expose his ideas about things" - I was noticing her choice of words - "and he wants you to respond. I think Ronald had a better mind than I did." "Oh Jean I can't believe that. In some things maybe." She concedes that, but I wonder if I'm seeing the cost of her happiness. And was it a cost, though she wasn't less intelligent than she was, presumably. "There are many times when something strikes me and I think, who could I share that with? And then I think, Ronald would know exactly what I mean. My parents were very devoted. My father thought the world of my mother. When he came into the house he'd say, where's your mother. Ronald was like that too. When he came home " I finish her sentence, "... he'd say, where's Jean." "He wasn't demonstrative, he was a reticent Englishman." "But you knew he loved you?" "Once we were talking about monasticism and he was saying he didn't think he could ever leave the world that way. And then he said, But if something had happened that had shattered my life, I might, if I lost you for instance. I treasured that." There was more. I've been listening to what you've been saying with a particular interest, she says, because there is a young man who .... Last week I spent what may have been the happiest day of my life with him. It seems ridiculous at my age, but he's so terrific. And he cares for me too. How young is he, I want to know. She doesn't want to say, but she does. "Around thirty-three." "What does he do?" "He spends his winters fishing off Alaska." "What does he do in the summer?" "Different things. He has an airplane in Seattle he's re-covering with fabric. He tries things." "Does he read?" "Yes he reads, and he likes good music too. Chamber music. His name is David. He's very good looking." "How do you know him?" "I've known his father for a long time. David used to visit here, and there'd be adult conversation passing across the room while he was in here by himself. The day after Ronald died his father was here, there were a lot of people. He was about seventeen then. When I was walking out to the car he caught my eye. We looked at each other and I thought, he is the only one who knows what I'm feeling. I mentioned it to him the other day and he remembered it too. I told him what Meister Eckhardt had said, that the closest thing to the nature of god is silence, and he said, That's beautiful. We have good pauses, when one of us is considering what the other has said, letting it sink in." When I mentioned hot flashes she said, I used to say to Ronald Look at this and draw a line down my arm. It would be a line of water. And she said this: One of the things I've always liked about this house is the way you walk directly out onto the ground, there's no step. I was looking at her grand old wreck wanting to learn the secret of success with men. How do you know what you know? What is balance with a man you like so much? How do you make him so happy he wants to stay with you? What does it cost you? She was in her mid-thirties when she married. Said she was awkward with people when she was young, but then in her university years fell in with people who liked to drink, and since then has found people easier. A photo of the two of them in 1952, she dark-haired, in dress and coat, slender, with a big unpretty face and round bosom, he at a few paces, looking at her. They're in a stand of young poplars. In their early forties probably. "Relationships are quite frenetic when they begin, especially between men and women," she says. "And then they settle down when the relation becomes deeper." "Is there anything you didn't like about him?" "He didn't like to talk in the mornings. He was moody sometimes. He didn't like to be crowded." - Evening, above High Bar Road. It's Friday. I'm going to sit here. My radiator hose blew. A cowboy who moves irrigation pipe cut off the hole and stretched what was left. Firs, pines, a wind, ants. I have driven all day through beauty and grieved. 6th A flat tire too, front right one. I look down onto the velveted slopes of the canyon at High Bar - velveted was the word I was looking for, the slopes have the small fur of velvet on antlers. The canyon is very animal - I have so much to say - do I? - who am also so baffled and silenced. Yes why not take off my shirt. I have a table. I'm alone. This place is simple and complex. It is simple in the unity of its color. I drove a road yesterday, fearlessly, that would have terrified me if Louie had been driving. It was a pleasure to take the car in first gear attentively around blind corners, down or up sudden steep inclines, and yesterday on the last very sharp slope, give it a little kick so it sprang up like a horse springing up over the top of a bank. I'll write this as it comes, out of order. The one color is sand brown. The mountains seem to be made of sand, the way they break off above the river is so soft. There is a skin of olive green on some of the slopes, so subtle it is like a reflectancy. And it is a reflectancy too, like the rougher woolly drifts I know to be sage. I hear two birds - three - one a single piping note repeated, and that other one is probably a cricket, it doesn't stop and it's like something rubbed over a little grating. The third was a crow, one caw. And then I heard a child's voice from the ranch very far below. I can hear the river if I listen - the wide mud-green river I can't see moving, it is so far away. The sound is a constant flow, very subtle. I like to see the line of a road far away crossing the west flank. It cuts the slope just where the smooth grainy upper slope, which is older and thinly treed, begins to break into facets and gullies. The road has the rationality of the contours it runs across, and it looks as if it were scratched out of the soft stuff by running a stick across it. I can imagine driving it. It's like the road I drove yesterday. What I saw yesterday - so much. The flying road, parkland after Riske Creek. - Oh look, look, at the way the color lies in those fissures in the second-last level below. It's sage in the gulches. The plants and their shadows paint the contours. They dramatize them. Every nuance of color means something. Where the gullies spill onto the bench above the last cliff, the color spills too, because it is the mark of water. As I flew through yesterday looking but not stopping: the glitter of reeds in a duck pond, the sound of trembling aspens. I came down through the Gang Ranch over a rough track, mudholes I'd sling myself through. The Fraser such a narrow thing there, a little suspension bridge spans it. Oh, and Falwell Canyon. Both those bridges had natives by them. And after the Gang the high road I drove with Louie, the lower end of it. Cliffs that were real rock, dark red, orange, pink. Holy cow, I said. But this wasn't yet the place to stop. Here on the map, past Big Bar ferry, is another road that runs along the canyon. I guessed the turn. Strict warnings that it's Indian land. And at the top of the rise from the ferry landing saw the opposite cliff gorgeously fantastically fractured and ordered. Yes, this place. Looking for a spot that has hidden parking, water and shade. There isn't such a spot. There's water where ranchers are irrigating. The few places where there are trees there is a ranch house. The eastern cliffs are sending down sheets of white light, huge power. I drive on. In this place I often forget to be sad but it is with me, I come back to it. Where is it, I remember to say. It's the forehead. It's regret, always about him. I talk about him. Why. Why doesn't it stop. A cold cloud. A wasp has found me. I dreamed. I'll say what I remember. A dark young man I meet again on the bus. He's below looking up at me, two eyes with brown skin around them. He's wearing a hood. The last time I saw him there was something wrong. I speak directly. He says he sometimes drinks. I'm sympathetic. I say that means he has problems with money too. He likes to know that I understand. We go to the room where he's going to have a class. He touches my head - such smooth strong pressure on my face and forehead. I will let him touch me as much as he wants, it is a wonderful touch. The other students come in, his girlfriend with them. He stops, or I do. She shouldn't see it. The ravaged bridegroom. Reading it last night ignoring where I am. Crying. I am so far so far from being able to do what I wanted to do with him, for me and for him. Her language discourages me. There are things I can grasp at. But so much of the terminology needs translating. Something I dislike about her. Something I want too. I'd have to find what she talks about and describe it in another way. There is something unclean in her. And her stories are not about me. But something in her materials. I think.
And then I cook. And then I'm rescued first by the two Indian men who spoke to me yesterday on the road, Robert and Chuck. And then by a young white man who was doing fish monitoring with them. And then by a white rancher who has an air compressor that works off the lighter, and his very white little girl with a calcium fossil of an aspen leaf. And then by Chuck's aunt Rose who is the area chief. I joke that the parking lot's getting full - the gravel turn-around where my car has an axe handle propping its trunk and my little primus is set up for a kitchen. Sunday 7th, viewpoint Fir saskatoon juniper rose kinnickkinnick, a pale fine grass in single tufts lime green and silver. A yellow butterfly. It, down there, the land, the grand land, is just sitting. Cougar country they said. Skin the color of a cougar's skin, great leaps of curves, very cougarish. Claws. It's dead through the lens, too distant and small, without its great and subtle depths. There's cricket, there's fir, in the wind. And look at the river, flat green, so slow, so perfectly even. A scum of white on the surface indicates events I can't see. Haze. A blue skin on the skin of everything distant, everything except the river, it seems. The haze evens out the colors: distant trees are not green like these near ones, but as if black, the same color as their shadows, with pale blue washed over. I keep seeing the haze as the color of air and not the way a painter would have to. Near. Far. A ground juniper on cracked rock. This rock that flakes so small. Something so beautiful is the way animal tracks cross the far slopes, differently than the water and differently than the roads. They lay a net over the banks. A net of obliques on many scales. The larger are deeper, the finest catch the light so even small areas have their fine-worked surface. See there, the side of the gully below the ranch, the way cattle have cut the sage into fine terraces. What am I trying to say. The way different forces are organizing the land at different scales - like different laws. So the skin of color wherever the slopes aren't freshly cut says precisely how much water there tends to be, says where the sun tends to be, and how the angle and direction of a slope intersect its range. Oh, see - what it is, is that the great complexity is visible here, you can see to know it. And there's a car that will be coming past here but not for a long time. Its slow cloud of dust. It's all an organization of purple and orange, in a way. Like this rock I'm sitting on. Big Bar. Is it that big silver island, or is it that slump of ground into the canyon. Did that happen in one day? A huge collapse. A slump above, a heap below, reciprocal. Then refined by certain means, not many. Water cut it (now I begin to hear the car - now it's past), green things marked it black. Smaller water cut its lines and left skin undisturbed between, and on that skin sage and this fine grass that goes orange where it's very dry. Deer tracks primeval. Cattle recent but in numbers, deepening the deer trails and cutting another sort of grazing track with their methodical steady plodding over every foot of ground. The net now scaled to the reach of a cow's neck, and I guess regulated by the angle of slope a cow can keep her footing on. Who came here? Who found this place? Who made the roads? Who drove the cattle? I'd like these people better. There are so few. They'll never be rich, they'll never be anything but wild. We could live here - we could work on a ranch - you'd like it here - it's not sea but on the cliff it's enough like the sea, enough of an edge. - Don't think that, I say. Monday 8th Rose's cabin This is a day of rain on the dry land, on the cabin roof. I'm beginning to fast. Have eaten less each day. Slow. Working very intensively on system. 9th Sick this morning. Rose and Florence in their new 4x4 say I have to leave tomorrow morning and suggest a place down the hill. Let your brakes cool off a couple of times, Florence says. Florence is the thin worrier. Bears, cougars, cars going off the cliff. "That's a city car." Rose is having trouble with new band members who've come in with Section C41. The band had six people, now it has thirty more and maybe a hundred coming. Hereditary chief: There's never been no elections and there never will be, says Florence. That's right, says Rose, who wears heavy pancake over her shaved upper lip and smiles with sprite corners on her mouth. A tall woman heavy on the top and tapering. Fifty-one. Soopolallie berries, Robert said, clean you right out. If you eat them your skin shines. I'm liking to eat them, bitter. A black fine shit the color of meconium, that falls down the shithole like a rock. A bird with a dull yellow breast. It's dark in the cabin. Windows frame bright plants, wild celery (she said they call the cow parsnip), willow, fireweed. The cow parsnip is beautiful - the cut of every leaf and the luminous green where it turns against the light. [*cow parsnip and cabin] 10th, flats above Big Bar Spences Bridge, Riske Creek, a night on the switchback, four nights in Rose's cabin - together a week to get here. There will be complete days here, days I see from first light right through to white stars. Nothing is lacking. Clear water ten paces from the tent. A road that goes back out of sight. A log barn for shade, a stone foundation for significance, and where the stream disperses onto a small tableland and the ground is green, a broken apple tree with ripe and green fruit. The smell of sage. I can hear the stream from my bed, and if I walk to the lip of the tableland I can hear and see the river. The velveted slope is near. There's a breeze. My tent rustles and flutters. I'm not strong - look at those mustard plants waving against the canyon, bronze feathers like peacock feathers tipped with an inch of green and a single yellow eye - but I'm well. I'm not here yet. This morning frightened looking over the edge. I did what they said and stopped halfway to cool the brakes. Put my hand onto the front left wheel-well and felt the heat. Knew I was alright until I could smell them. In the morning with the light coming from behind me I'll be able to see the dark red in that rocky bluff to the northwest. It's noon I think. I've set a bucket of water to warm in the sun so there will be wash water in the evening. I think it will be alright to make a fire here but I'm going to rest before foraging for wood. Packing the car this morning strained my heart. This must be what it's like for Jean. There's even an outhouse. It's built next to the ravine so there's no hole dug. A valentine cut into the door. Clouds today. It could be hot but isn't. Am I working today? Then I should make a table in the barn. Don't want to work. I woke at night each of those nights in the cabin. Long wakings. Trying to loosen the solar plex. What are you holding down, I asked it. Saw a young woman crouching below a board across the middle of the body. Adoration is the word it seemed to agree to. 11 I walked, a mile probably, toward the strange rock tower with a smooth lap shored up against it. I just want to see what that shiny thing is on the other side of the pine tree. It was a camper blocked up on cottonwood rounds, set facing across the river so the bed part that projects over the cab made an awning over a deck-chair and a plank table. I sat in the chair, put my legs on the table, looked across, on and on, soft, at the soft canyon with its soft skin of color. Walking back I said, Why shouldn't I live with Rob, he can cook, he is loyal, he's rational, he's heaven in bed, he's full of love, he's a worker, he studies, he's lucid and private, he's honest, he's transparent, he's not jealous, he has the magnetic sense, he's a soul, he doesn't exploit, he wants a lot of time alone, he has a will. I thought that as I was thinking of food - making supper, learning new things to cook. 12th Friday Fifth day. Woke weak and sickish. Lying awake at night with my solar hurting. I said to it Love the stars, and then there'd be sensation in the heart instead. But soon the solar would clamp again. I thought it was because I was speaking to myself in a loving tone the solar dissolved. I went to imagining David McAra and that put me to sleep. He was cooking Leah's canelloni stuffed with prawns, and serving it with green salad, a sharp oil and vinegar dressing, and white wine. I put out my arms to the stars and said Create in me a new heart. Create in me a strong heart, a fierce heart. The tent with its flaps tied up on high poles to make an awning is like a desert tent. And I am in a desert where the apple tree is both blasted and infested. I am starving, too weak to walk up a slope without heart strain. Yet there is water near. At dusk and early morning the little wild chickens come tame and clucking, a sound that at a distance is like the water burbling in the small stream. I make a fire in a wheel-well I found near the outhouse. Dried mustard stalks and small sticks bring the large full kettle to a chuckling boil in a few minutes. That water is for washing and for a bowl of camomile tea. But I don't like the taste of this water even in tea. It's flat. I've been so weak I've lain in the tent most of the day. As the sun was near setting I made myself walk to the plank bridge for water. Lay on the bridge and saw a rock in the slanting light, a roundish small pinkish boulder, that was running with lines of light and reflected in an exquisitely clear and mobile picture of itself upside down. There were trunks of trees throbbing as if they were veins. And the other small clearnesses of that running pool: decayed leafbits on the bottom, a wet fresh smell, a yellow caterpillar floating downstream, a longlegged fly darting, and all the other simple colors exquisitely separate shaking together on the surface, blue, brown, white, black, green. What's this big wind. There are my panties hung on a barb to dry, with a pair of red socks, and my purple teeshirt nicely shaped over a log corner brace of the old fence. At intervals in the day and night the thump of an apple falling. Sometimes that cottonwood at the top of the gulch has a wind to itself and flares into sound alone, like a burning bush. Oh but that one hit here too and shook even the car. 13th Saturday Slept in the tent, needed to be held in. Woke stronger. Got up before sunrise and made my fast little fire. The cattle came and are still here on the green patch. There's a bull but he doesn't have horns. Dreamed I checked myself into a mental hospital. I'm making myself weak and ugly and nothing is happening. What did you want to have happen? Tears, an explosion that does away with ego. Some interesting state like a drug state. Something to tell me it isn't just a dull weak kind of camping that entertains itself with delusion. 14 Sunday Heard a cow cough in first light, saw they were on their way back. Jumped in the car and chased them. The stubborn brown cow held her ground until I was almost on top of her and at the last moment stretched her neck insolently into the ditch for another bite of weed. It is hazed over and windy. Am I less weak, maybe. Yesterday, afraid of the bull who with his herd had taken possession of the green grass, and very weak, I hid out in the loft of the broken log barn and kept lying down. It was often too windy to work with the string. I'm imagining leaving. Have been so torpid, three days I almost haven't seen. Began to eat. It was the salty broth I wanted. Have been sinking into a feeble self concern: checked into a mental hospital. But I feel cured of K. I want to go home and have a beautiful house and a quiet man and fine cooking and good clothes and spare money and more of this work but with a desk. I want a fireplace, radiators, a warm winter. House cleaned once a week the way we've cleaned houses. A refrigerator. A street with cafes. A VCR. A CD player. A computer. A toaster. Walls with good plaster. Really I want to leave right now. I want to sit at my desk with good books not heart improvement junk.
Oasis Hotel, Cache Creek 16th I've never felt this nausea at the thought of the journal. Yet I'd like to know what happened. When I'd begun to eat I revolted. I said, I'm going. I'm going up this end. Rose, Florence and Ralph beeped as I was packing, waited at the gate in Rose's regal way. I was in bare feet and thought, let them have it, picking my way limping toward them. Ralph gave me a salmon. Rose had her eye on the way I was sticking a finger into its slit belly as we talked. Drop me a line. I will. Are you feeling better? says Florence. I feel fine I say. I'm opening the gate as they drive away. I have done what I can for the car. Oil, power steering fluid, run the heater with fan on high. Then I drive the way I've seen them do it, creeping steadily. What I did last time was wrong, the notion of taking a run at it. I stop partway up to look at the tires. A wisp of smoke or steam comes out from under the hood as I'm pulling into the turn-around. This time I know not to turn off the engine like I did last time. I smell the engine, listen for boiling. It seems alright. I keep going. There are rocks on the road I have to steer around, keeping in mind the edges. The sun has come out, I drive out of shade into sun, and then back into shade. I am paying such acute attention to the temperature of the air blasting out of the heater vents that the increase of heat with sun is alarming. But then I understand. Another thing that happens is I'm gaining altitude so quickly my ears pop. I swallow. The motor is suddenly twice as loud, and that is alarming too. There is also a change in the quality of the sound. But it seems alright, strong and even. When it happens again I know what to expect and listen for it interestedly. I get to the viewpoint pulloff where the sign marks the top of the worst. S 5 KM TRUCKS GEAR DOWN. Get out, leave the engine running. Look at the High Bar bench. I'm done with it. Drive away. Oasis Hotel. When I take off my clothes I see a startling body, I see my skeleton, a body seventy years old. I was dehydrated I think. I eat half a little watermelon. The tock sound of the knife cutting into water gives me great pleasure. For supper I order chicken cordon bleu. It's obviously freezer-microwave chicken, but the cheese sauce with the baked potato green onions and corn is exquisite. I combine tastes on my fork with loving concentration. Then I come up and watch TV. I'm sick at the thought of any of my books, or the journal or the string. There are two hours of an American woman giving precise explanations of menopause. The women they cut away to in the audience seem all to have the same quality of sexless oddity, while the woman lecturing, who spaces her words like words on a page, all separate, even, with no gusts or lags, looks hormonally female and quite symmetrical, but entirely unnatural, as if every tone and gesture is calculated. What was strangest was the way at the end of each segment she would deliver her concluding sentence, say "Thank you," and then smile. Then walk off the stage. That smile repeated each time had more than one effect. The first time it looked as if it might be real: That's done, now I can turn it off. Disarming. Seeing it twice was seeing it's in the script. And yet it still works, it still says, Here I am, I was playing the part, it took a lot of concentration and now I'll relax. Then there was Joyce Brothers lecturing on love in something of the same style. A flat hangdog face set in stiffened hair. A turquoise brocade suit that holds attention with its color and small detail, very well judged to give her command of the platform. I'm telling these stories about watching television to try to know what I knew. Why don't I know it at the time? Confluence. But why confluence. I've just remembered a moment on Brothers' show when she had three guests telling about the difficulty of dating again in middle age. Something happened that puzzled me. Brothers addressed the woman on her right and then the woman on her left. There was an inevitable pace, three sentences each, something like that. But then while talking with the woman on her left she suddenly jumped to the man on the far left and kept him talking. And then another unexpected thing happened: the woman on her right suddenly spoke without being addressed. Then for the rest of the sequence Brothers continued to ignore the woman on her left, who was quite a nice Englishy plaid-skirt sort of woman. I've just now remembered what it was in the sentence before Brothers cut her off. She said, It's about filling the gap, the gap is so hard to fill. And what the woman on the right said, when she jumped in uninvited, was, For me there was no gap at all. I had no financial support, I had young children, it was full-time work holding it all together. I can't tell whether she was rescuing the other woman or replying truly, in the ingenuousness that had me gripped as well. What else I'm thinking now is how the stiffness in this writing is like the stiffness of those lecturing women, who are machines talking about bodies. What I'm thinking further back is about superstition and dependence, which take me to a shelf in a terraced desert and lead me to starve myself until I am so weak I can barely walk. It was a sacrifice I guess. If I stopped short of the time I said, I suppose I voided it. What was the prayer for? I know that because I know what I dread to have lost by voiding it. But it is something I believe already lost. I rebelled. It was as if something turned. The surge when I refused to let the cattle come back. This uncertainty is what brings me to give my decisions to whatever is speaking in the cards and string, and to Joyce. I drove up the mountain. I ate. I've called Rob to say come up and we'll drive back together. The Oasis Hotel is the building I used to recognize Cache Creek by when I was a child on the way to the coast. We'd come down into the dry country and there'd be a hotel at a junction. Eyes from the back seat of the Mercury turning to look back at it. The desk is also the Greyhound depot. A rancher in high tight boots comes to drop an envelope into a box marked JJ Ranch. Here is someone shipping a suitcase. This is the hotel the Indians use. Tour buses stand in the court: there's a man with the intelligent look an unintelligent Frenchman can wear. I came down before daylight and stood on the pavement eating a cold peach I got from my trunk. There were four people sitting in the coffee shop. Staff. Now much later a blast of live music tailing off as the bar door sighs closed. A young redhead in a Greyhound driver's uniform. That very sun-blackened redbearded guy I think is a ditch prospector. An Arab family on the way to the Commonwealth Games. A handsome East Indian man, tall and beak-nosed, with his wife and either her or his brother. Two couples in a booth, man and woman on each side arranged so like is speaking to like, independent streams across the table. I heard the word 'unconsciously' from one of the men and concluded something from it. A gay man (from the way he holds his bum when he walks) wearing a tooled leather shoulder bag comes through the lobby to the bar. - I was right, there he's come out with his friend. They're speaking German. He said something to me I didn't understand. It sounded like 'Seit noch.' 17 Here is a thing to find my way thru - café in Ashcroft, standing at the counter buying borscht - there's a man staring at me - he's gorgeous - fair clean-shaven forty - Ken's type - an interested look - startles me, I don't know just what it means - it is the sort of look that kind of man can send out once and after that I notice it's me looking at him - rancher's big rectangular belt buckle, small bum - what about it - intimidation, fantasy, hope, fear, self consciousness - loss of the presence that brought the look - I have to understand this - it wipes out my self collection in an instant - I know how to pretend to ignore it - it has to be something other than that. 18 Ashcroft A night by the river. Working last evening on the picnic table, after salmon soup. Crying with grief at how helpless I was. We were; he too. I take the black bowl down the bank to the river, fill it with water, float a chip of bark on it, set Ken's lump of resin on it, alight. It is burning in the shelter of a boulder, sending up smoke into my face. I talk to him. I don't remember what I say. Then I straighten my back and ask for myself. That's the ritual. You came through, it said. The night. Drove my car sideways to the yard light at the campground to make a patch of shadow, and set my bed in it. It is a nice-looking bed when it's made up. I put on my pyjamas out of the car door and get into it. A train. There's a track just next to the park and another on the other side of the river, mine trains running all the time, big freights. I don't want the night of trains. Or this yard light. But I decide I'll just listen. The whistle, the squeals, a very high small screech. I can't write it, I don't think, the mass of dark wheel and motor rhythms overlaid in a deeply carved running band of solid night air. A pleasure to hear and see. Above me the riverside trees with the powerful yard light shining up against them. They are unwritable too, ashes and aspens, flame-shaped structures rising up in flame-shaped bits, jaggy like thin metals silver and gold fine-cut in moonlight of some other moon. And there are stars. The simple few famous ones white in dark blue. When a train had passed, the river again. 20th Logan Lake I wonder whether I will forget the mine. It was one of the wonders of the world, like an amphitheatre of the gods carved out of pink-orange rock, served by huge tiny motorized priests moving at an even pace among clouds of creamy dust. A beautiful free logical mythological structure. The whole side of a mountain carved away into terraces and ramps, with rounded lumpy dumps of rocky material in rows in the foreground, and a monumental double-pipe stepped up through the midst of the crusher-dust at the centre. On our side of the road - we were a half mile away - a flat-topped mountain of crushed rock, exquisitely colored in creams oranges browns and pinks, the color running down in streaks. Happy Valley copper mine. 21st Nicola Valley Trying to fight with Rob before we went to sleep. He sinks immediately and deeply into self-pity and from that sunken position will defend himself quite stubbornly. I give up in disgust. That makes it an effective defense I guess. In the night he wakes me. There's a bear. We watch it on the far bank of the little river. It is blacker in the moonlight than any of the trees. It enters the water, seems to come toward us, turns and swims downstream. Then it quickly climbs onto the far bank again. There are a few heavy thwacks. I imagine a big fish. We watch carefully as it stands around and then walks away on the grassy bank. We have been talking quietly so it will know we are there. In the morning we both say the river is only half as wide as it looked in the night, the bear was smaller and nearer than we saw it. This is a strange observation, as if distance expands and contracts. It was full moon. 22nd Mt Curry A road yesterday from the Nicola Valley to Spences Bridge, then a back road off the highway east toward Hat Creek. The surprise of that valley wide cold and rich. Parked eating corn on the cob looking over a duck marsh. Down toward Lilloet on pavement and then the Seton Portage road, surprising, difficult, washboarded. A 6 km climb, nervous, then 7 km down to Chalath and Seton Portage. Will we make it out tomorrow? Let's check with the local people about that road along the lake. They call it the Highliner. It sounds bad. They say it's okay, we can do it, we won't bottom out. Lloyd in the café says we can sleep on a little spot he cleared next to the river. A hard night. The water very loud, worrying about the road out, and something else, as if a bad spirit of the place. Spits of rain toward morning. We get up and do it, 28 km very careful driving, but easier than some of what I've done this trip. We dared well. Now we're in coast mountain and wet forest, the high land is behind us. I have very little to say. I mean very little pressure to say. There has been comment all along. The strange spirit beside me. What can I make of this relation. He enjoys himself quietly, stays close to wherever he is in a mild pleased way. Addresses the small things gently. Chipmunks. "Such a li-tul thing." Doesn't take offence when I don't respond. Stood beside the car this morning in his swimming shorts a skinny little boy. Notes plants everywhere. Washes the dishes. Keeps as much attention on the road as I do. There was a moment in the café at Lillooet when he exerted himself with the waiter, who was a boy of maybe seventeen. "D'you want to find out for us?" What kind of pie. "I've asked twice." What? says the waiter. Rob is already asserting himself and now has to manage a crisis of humility and annoyance at odds. "Do-you-want-to-find-out-for-us?" He writhes, sinks into his chair and goes mottled dark red all at the same time, a sight to make me despair if I'm trying to think of him as a lover. On the road high over the green lake this morning I was talking to him about the subtle body book and centered energy. "Anybody could do it." I heard myself say that twice and from his tone knew he knew I was wanting to change him. I don't think he knows how hard he is to look at. Seeing his face on the pillow with chin receding weakly even in sleep, no, I can't go further with this, I say. A lovely person. I haven't stopped asking how K would be in our different circumstances. He wouldn't have enjoyed the big young dog dashing across the yard with the tiny cat last night, the way Rob did. He'd be irritable and insistent and I wouldn't have my own counsel. He'd be gentlemanly with people in cafes, and I'd be pleased to be seen with him. I wouldn't get to do the driving, and I wouldn't be sitting here now, because he'd have been in a hurry. He'd be elsewhere most of he time, telling me how this is like a road in Labrador or Scotland. Not a good traveling companion. Fretting. I'd have to be trying to contain him. He'd have had a rush of delight about the bear maybe.
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