The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [81]
I went out to greet him. He was coming across the tall final grass, weary from the day’s work, clomping along in his boots, his coat over his back. “Well, Smith, here you are.”
“I cooked up a nice pot of beans for you.”
“You did?” He was tremendously grateful. “Boy, what a relief to come home from work and don’t have to cook up a meal yourself. I’m starved.” He pitched right into the beans with bread and hot coffee I made in a pan on the stove, just French style brewing coffee stirred with a spoon. We had a great supper and then lit up our pipes and talked with the fire roaring. “Ray, you’re going to have a great summer up on that Desolation Peak. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I’m gonna have a great spring right here in this shack.”
“Durn right, first thing we do this weekend is invite some nice new girls I know, Psyche and Polly Whitmore, though wait a minute, hmm. I can’t invite both of them they both love me and’ll be jealous. Anyway we’ll have big parties every weekend, starting downstairs at Sean’s and ending up here. And I’m not workin tomorrow so we’ll cut some firewood for Sean. That’s all he wants you to do. Though, if you wanta work on that job of ours in Sausalito next week, you can make ten bucks a day.”
“Fine…that’ll buy a lotta pork and beans and wine.”
Japhy pulled out a fine brush drawing of a mountain. “Here’s your mountain that’ll loom over you, Hozomeen. I drew it myself two summers ago from Crater Peak. In nineteen-fifty-two I first went into that Skagit country, hitched from Frisco to Seattle and then in, with a beard just started and a bare shaved head—”
“Bare shaved head! Why?”
“To be like a bhikku, you know what it says in the sutras.”
“But what did people think about you hitchhiking around with a bare shaved head?”
“They thought I was crazy, but everybody that gave me a ride I’d spin ’em the Dharmy, boy, and leave ’em enlightened.”
“I shoulda done a bit of that myself hitchin out here just now…. I gotta tell you about my arroyo in the desert mountains.”
“Wait a minute, so they put me on Crater Mountain lookout but the snow was so deep in the high country that year I worked trail for a month first in Granite Creek gorge, you’ll see all those places, and then with a string of mules we made it the final seven miles of winding Tibetan rocktrail above timber line over snowfields to the final jagged pinnacles, and then climbed the cliffs in a snowstorm and I opened my cabin and cooked my first dinner while the wind howled and the ice grew on two walls in the wind. Boy, wait’ll you get up there. That year my friend Jack Joseph was on Desolation, where you’ll be.”
“What a name, Desolation, oo, wow, ugh, wait…”
“He was the first lookout to go up, I got him on my radio first off and he welcomed me to the community of lookouts. Later I contacted other mountains, see they give you a two-way radio, it’s almost a ritual all the lookouts chat and talk about bears they’ve seen or sometimes ask instructions for how to bake muffins on a woodstove and so on, and there we all were in a high world talking on a net of wireless across hundreds of miles of wilderness. It’s a primitive area, where you’re going boy. From my cabin I could see the lamps of Desolation after dark, Jack Joseph reading his geology books and in the day we flashed by mirror to align our firefinder