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By Root 902 0

into a beautiful night’s rest under the sighing trees, meditating awhile first. I couldn’t meditate indoors any more like Japhy had just done, after all that winter in the woods of night I had to hear the little sounds of animals and birds and feel the cold sighing earth under me before I could rightly get to feel a kinship with all living things as being empty and awake and saved already. I prayed for Japhy: it looked like he was changing for the worse. At dawn a little rain pattered on my sleeping bag and I put my poncho over me instead of under me, cursing, and slept on. At seven in the morning the sun was out and the butterflies were in the roses by my head and a hummingbird did a jet dive right down at me, whistling, and darted away happily. But I was mistaken about Japhy changing. It was one of the greatest mornings in our lives. There he was standing in the doorway of the shack with a big frying pan in his hand banging on it and chanting “Buddham saranam gocchami…Dhammam saranam gocchami…Sangham saranam gocchami” and yelling “Come on, boy, your pancakes are ready! Come and get it! Bang bang bang” and the orange sun was pouring in through the pines and everything was fine again, in fact Japhy had contemplated that night and decided I was right about hewing to the good old Dharma.

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Japhy had cooked up some good buckwheat pancakes and we had Log Cabin syrup to go with them and a little butter. I asked him what the “Gocchami” chant meant. “That’s the chant they give out for the three meals in Buddhist monasteries in Japan. It means, Buddham Saranam Gocchami, I take refuge in the Buddha, Sangham, I take refuge in the church, Dhammam, I take refuge in the Dharma, the truth. Tomorrow morning I’ll make you another nice breakfast, slumgullion, d’yever eat good old-fashioned slumgullion boy, ’taint nothin but scrambled eggs and potatoes all scrambled up together.”

“It’s a lumberjack meal?”

“There ain’t no such thing as lumber jack, that must be a Back East expression. Up here we call ’em loggers. Come on eat up your pancakes and we’ll go down and split logs and I’ll show you how to handle a doublebitted ax.” He took the ax out and sharpened it and showed me how to sharpen it. “And don’t ever use this ax on a piece of wood that’s on the ground, you’ll hit rocks and blunt it, always have a log or sumpthin for a block.”

I went out to the privy and, coming back, wishing to surprise Japhy with a Zen trick I threw the roll of toilet paper through the open window and he let out a big Samurai Warrior roar and appeared on the windowsill in his boots and shorts with a dagger in his hand and jumped fifteen feet down into the loggy yard. It was crazy. We started downhill feeling high. All the logs that had been bucked had more or less of a crack in them, where you more or less inserted the heavy iron wedge, and then, raising a five-pound sledgehammer over your head, standing way back so’s not to hit your own ankle, you brought it down konko on the wedge and split the log clean in half. Then you’d sit the half-logs up on a block-log and let down with the doublebitted ax, a long beautiful ax, sharp as a razor, and fawap, you had quarter-logs. Then you set up a quarter-log and brought down to an eighth. He showed me how to swing the sledge and the ax, not too hard, but when he got mad himself I noticed he swung the ax as hard as he could, roaring his famous cry, or cursing. Pretty soon I had the knack and was going along as though I’d been doing it all my life.

Christine came out in the yard to watch us and called “I’ll have some nice lunch for ya.”

“Okay.” Japhy and Christine were like brother and sister.

We split a lot of logs. It was great swinging down the sledgehammer, all the weight clank on top of a wedge and feeling that log give, if not the first time the second time. The smell of sawdust, pine trees, the breeze blowing over the placid mountains from the sea, the meadowlarks singing, the butterflies in the grass, it was perfect. Then we went in and ate a good lunch of hotdogs and rice and soup and red wine and Christine