The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [37]
“You know,” I said, “I think it doesn’t make any difference to him anyway. He’s just satisfied to wander around and forget things.”
“And pat his belly and look at things as they are, sorta like in Chuangtse” and Japhy and I had a good laugh watching forlorn Henry swaggering down all that road we’d only just negotiated, alone and mad.
“Well here we go” said Japhy. “When I get tired of this big rucksack we’ll swap.”
“I’m ready now. Man, come on, give it to me now, I feel like carrying something heavy. You don’t realize how good I feel, man, come on!” So we swapped packs and started off.
Both of us were feeling fine and were talking a blue streak, about anything, literature, the mountains, girls, Princess, the poets, Japan, our past adventures in life, and I suddenly realized it was a kind of blessing in disguise Morley had forgotten to drain the crankcase, otherwise Japhy wouldn’t have got in a word edgewise all the blessed day and now I had a chance to hear his ideas. In the way he did things, hiking, he reminded me of Mike my boyhood chum who also loved to lead the way, real grave like Buck Jones, eyes to the distant horizons, like Natty Bumppo, cautioning me about snapping twigs or “It’s too deep here, let’s go down the creek a ways to ford it,” or “There’ll be mud in that low bottom, we better skirt around” and dead serious and glad. I saw all Japhy’s boyhood in those eastern Oregon forests the way he went about it. He walked like he talked, from behind I could see his toes pointed slightly inward, the way mine do, instead of out; but when it came time to climb he pointed his toes out, like Chaplin, to make a kind of easier flapthwap as he trudged. We went across a kind of muddy riverbottom through dense undergrowth and a few willow trees and came out on the other side a little wet and started up the trail, which was clearly marked and named and had been recently repaired by trail crews but as we hit parts where a rock had rolled on the trail he took great precaution to throw the rock off saying “I used to work on trail crews, I can’t see a trail all mettlesome like that, Smith.” As we climbed the lake began to appear below us and suddenly in its clear blue pool we could see the deep holes where the lake had its springs, like black wells, and we could see schools of fish skitter.
“Oh this is like an early morning in China and I’m five years old in beginningless time!” I sang out and felt like sitting by the trail and whipping out my little notebook and writing sketches about it.
“Look over there,” sang Japhy, “yellow aspens. Just put me in the mind of a haiku…‘Talking about the literary life—the yellow aspens.’” Walking in this country you could understand the perfect gems of haikus the Oriental poets had written, never getting drunk in the mountains or anything but just going along as fresh as children writing down what they saw without literary devices or fanciness of expression. We made up haikus as we climbed, winding up and up now on the slopes of brush.
“Rocks on the side of the cliff,” I said, “why don’t they tumble down?”
“Maybe that’s a haiku, maybe not, it might be a little too complicated,” said Japhy. “A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes ‘The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.’ By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles.”
“Let’s have another.”
“I’ll make up one of my own this time, let’s see, ‘Lake below…the black holes the wells make,’ no that’s not a haiku goddammit, you never can be too careful about haiku.”
“How about making them up real fast as you go along, spontaneously?”
“Look here,” he cried happily, “mountain lupine, see the delicate blue color those little flowers have. And there’s some California red poppy over there. The