The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [107]
We finally got out of there and climbed on up, soon leaving the shrubbery and entering a new alpine height of rocky meadow with blue lupine and red poppy feathering the gray mist with lovely vaguenesses of color and the wind blowing hard now and with sleet. “Five thousand feet now!” yelled Happy from up front, turning in the saddle with his old hat furling in the wind, rolling himself a cigarette, sitting easy in his saddle from a whole lifetime on horses. The heather wildflower drizzly meadows wound up and up, on switchback trails, the wind getting harder all the time, finally Happy yelled: “See that big rock face up thar?” I looked up and saw a goopy shroud of gray rock in the fog, just above. “That’s another thousand feet though you might think you can reach up and touch it. When we get there we’re almost in. Only another half hour after that.”
“You sure you didn’t bring just a little extry bottle of brandy boy?” he yelled back a minute later. He was wet and miserable but he didn’t care and I could hear him singing in the wind. By and by we were up above timberline practically, the meadow gave way to grim rocks and suddenly there was snow on the ground to the right and to the left, the horses were slowshing in a sleety foot of it, you could see the water holes their hoofs left, we were really way up there now. Yet on all sides I could see nothing but fog and white snow and blowing mists. On a clear day I would have been able to see the sheer drops from the side of the trail and would have been scared for my horse’s slips of hoof; but now all I saw were vague intimations of treetops way below that looked like little clumps of grasses. “O Japhy,” I thought, “and there you are sailing across the ocean safe on a ship, warm in a cabin, writing letters to Psyche and Sean and Christine.”
The snow deepened and hail began to pelt our red weather-beaten faces and finally Happy yelled from up ahead “We’re almost there now.” I was cold and wet: I got off the horse and simply led her up the trail, she grunted a kind of groan of relief to be rid of the weight and followed me obediently. She already had quite a load of supplies, anyway. “There she is!” yelled Happy and in the swirled-across top-of-the-world fog I saw a funny little peaked almost Chinese cabin among little pointy firs and boulders standing on a bald rock top surrounded by snowbanks and patches of wet grass with tiny flowers.
I gulped. It was too dark and dismal to like it. “This will be my home and restingplace all summer?”
We trudged on to the log corral built by some old lookout of the thirties and tethered the animals and took down the packs. Happy went up and took the weather door off and got the keys and opened her up and inside it was all gray dank gloomy muddy floor with rain-stained walls and a dismal wooden bunk with a mattress made of ropes (so as not to attract lightning) and the windows completely impenetrable with dust and worst of all the floor littered with magazines torn and chewed up by mice and pieces of groceries too and uncountable little black balls of rat turd.
“Well,” said Wally showing his long teeth at me, “it’s gonna take you a long time to clean up this mess, hey? Start in right now by taking all those leftover canned goods off the shelf and running a wet soapy rag over that filthy shelf.” Which I did, and I had to do, I was getting paid.
But good old Happy got a roaring woodfire going in the potbelly stove and put on a pot of water and dumped half a can of coffee in it and yelled “Ain’t nothing like real strong coffee, up in this country boy we want coffee that’ll make