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By Root 987 0

Valley is second only to the Nile for fertility.” He left me off at Highway 1-G, which was the little highway to 17-A that wound into the heart of the mountains and in fact would come to a dead-end as a dirt road at Diablo Dam. Now I was really in the mountain country. The fellows who picked me up were loggers, uranium prospectors, farmers, they drove me through the final big town of Skagit Valley, Sedro Woolley, a farming market town, and then out as the road got narrower and more curved among cliffs and the Skagit River, which we’d crossed on 99 as a dreaming belly river with meadows on both sides, was now a pure torrent of melted snow pouring narrow and fast between muddy snag shores. Cliffs began to appear on both sides. The snow-covered mountains themselves had disappeared, receded from my view, I couldn’t see them any more but now I was beginning to feel them more.

32

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 ’n’ Bill couple left me off at a grocery store in Sauk and there I got my final ride from a mad drunk fastswerving dark long-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.”

“Who does he think he is speeding on government property.”

I gulped, I wasn’t a free bhikku any more. Not until I’d get to my hideaway mountain that next week. I had to spend a whole week at Fire School with whole bunches of young kids, all of us in tin hats which we wore either straight on our heads or as I did at a rakish tilt, and we dug fire lines in the wet woods or felled trees or put out experimental small fires and I met the oldtimer ranger and onetime logger Burnie Byers, the “lumberjack” that Japhy was always imitating with his big deep funny voice.

Burnie and I sat in his truck in the woods and discussed Japhy. “It’s a damn shame Japhy ain’t come back this year. He was the best lookout we ever had and by God he was the best trailworker I ever seen. Just eager and anxious to go climbin around and so durn cheerful, I ain’t never seen a better kid. 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 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