Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [40]
He found that the steep country remained beautiful and sometimes hard to travel even in these latter days, and he also regained the old feeling that life could be enlarged by burning a few gallons of twenty-cent gas as an offering to the mountains. A spiritual transaction, like the Sioux with their tobacco, or like his own ancestors who’d had a hard time letting go of the deep idea that particular landforms and plants and animals and weather were sufficient within themselves, leaving no great need to affiliate with larger outside abstractions.
One favorite route went with the flow of the river down the dim gorge, sunlit only at midday, the twists of the road like swirling toward a drain somewhere ahead. Then later, an exhilarating tire-squealing race up the switchbacks of the Jorre Gap, toward the clear thin light of the upper altitudes where dark balsams grew. One afternoon, he drove the dirt road all the way up to the fire tower on Juala Bald. He had gotten the impression as a boy that legendary Indian things involving giant flying lizards or spear-fingered monsters happened up there. Now illicit lovers drove the winding dirt road for trysts in the midnight hour, at least that was the story he’d heard at the barbershop. But, then, to hear the barbershop loafers tell it, lovers went all kinds of places. Around the lake, down the gorge, along the river. The complex mountain landscape, with all its nooks, offered infinite possibilities for romance. And yet, Stubblefield had nothing of the sort in his life, except listening over and over to his scratchy copy of Kind of Blue and getting sad. Love, at least sustaining it, had not been his best talent. His best talent had yet to be determined, unless you counted unrealized potential.
At the tower, he climbed the winding open metal stairs to the tiny high room and knocked on the door. The sleepy-looking ranger seemed less than happy to have a visitor, but he opened up. Stubblefield stood breathless. Windows three-sixty, revealing dizzying vistas, green valleys thousands of feet below, blue mountains circling farther and farther until they faded into sky.
The ranger, hardly older than Stubblefield, behaved not at all lonesome and talky but like he’d been interrupted on a busy afternoon, though the entire horizon appeared free of smoke plumes. His hair lay lopsided on his head, mashed flat on the left and sticking out in greasy points on the right. Sort of a dirty-sheet smell to the place, and a skinned-over bowl of cold tomato soup on the table. Huge black binoculars fixed to a tripod, a long desk below one bank of windows, covered with many pale green topographic rectangles and scattered pages of notebook paper dense with tiny pencil scribble. Barely visible atop a peak in the distance, another tower. The radio crackled and the far ranger started talking about weather, a change coming. The faint voice said, We get a week of rain, maybe we can get off these damn knobs for a few days.
Stubblefield looked down toward the town and the lake. He held his hand at arm’s length from his face, and it nearly covered them both. Everything else was mountains and coves and valley, already shifting away from the highest pitch of summer green. Where would the big ag-lease fields and the Lodge and the Roadhouse be down there? The round black circle of the burnt farmhouse?
Thinking that surveying his new holdings from such a distance would be clarifying, Stubblefield said, Mind if I take a look through the binoculars?
—Sorry, no can do. Sensitive instrument.
The ranger looked at his watch. Impatient, like time was pressing.
—Big date? Stubblefield asked.
The ranger said, Maybe you could