Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

I didn't want to disturb anything in the house till he got back from work so I went out and lay down in the tall green grass in the sun and waited all afternoon, dreaming. But then I realized, "I might as well make a nice supper for Japhy" and I went down the hill again and down the road to the store and bought beans, saltpork, various groceries and came back and lit a fire in the woodstove and boiled up a good pot of New England beans, with molasses and onions. I was amazed at the way Japhy stored his food: just on a shelf by the woodstove: two onions, an orange, a bag of wheat germ, cans of curry powder, rice, mysterious pieces of dried Chinese seaweed, a bottle of soy sauce (to make his mysterious Chinese dishes). His salt and pepper was all neatly wrapped up in little plastic wrappers bound with elastic. There wasn't any- thing in the world Japhy would ever waste, or lose. Now I was introducing into his kitchen all the big substantial pork-and-beans of the world, maybe he wouldn't like it. He also had a big chunk of Christine's fine brown bread, and his bread knife was a dagger simply stuck into the board.

It got dark and I waited in the yard, letting the pot of beans keep warm on the fire. I chopped some wood and added it to the pile behind the stove. The fog began to blow in from the Pacific, the trees bowed deeply and roared. From the top of the hill you could see nothing but trees, trees, a roaring sea of trees. It was paradise. As it got cold I went inside and stoked up the fire, singing, and closed the windows. The windows were simply removable opaque plastic pieces that had been cleverly carpentered by Whitey Jones, Christine's brother, they let in light but you couldn't see anything outdoors and they cut off the cold wind. Soon it was warm in the cozy cabin. By and by I heard a "Hoo" out in the roaring sea of fog trees and it was Japhy coming back.

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 transits, accurate to the compass."

"Gee, how'll I ever learn all that, I'm just a simple poet bum."

"Oh you'll learn, the magnetic pole, the pole star and the northern lights. Every night Jack Joseph and I talked: one day he got a swarm of ladybugs on the lookout that covered the roof and filled up his water cistern, another day he went for a walk along the ridge and stepped right on a sleeping bear."

"Oho, I thought /this/ place was wild."

"This is nothin… and when the lightning storm came by, closer and closer, he called to finally say he was going off the air because the storm was too close to leave his radio on, he disappeared from sound and then sight as the black clouds swept over and the lightning danced on his hill. But as the summer passed Desolation got dry and flowery and Blakey lambs and he wandered the cliffs and I was on Crater Mountain in my jockstrap and boots hunting out ptarmigan nests out of curiosity, climbing and pooking about, gettin bit by bees… Desolation's way up there, Ray, six thousand feet or so up looking into Canada and the Chelan highlands, the wilds of the Pickett range, and mountains like Challenger, Terror, Fury, Despair and the name of your own ridge is Starvation Ridge and the upcountry of the Boston Peak and Buckner Peak range to the south thousands of miles of mountains, deer, bear, conies, hawks, trout, chipmunks. It'll be great for you Ray."

"I look forward to it okay. I bet no bee bites me." Then he took out his books and read awhile, and I read too, both of us with separate oil lamps banked low, a quiet evening at home as the foggy wind roared in the trees outside and across the valley a mournful mule heehawed in one of the most tremendously heartbroken cries I've ever heard. "When that mule weeps like that," says Japhy, "I feel like praying for all sentient beings."

Then for a while he meditated motionless in the full lotus position on his mat and then said "Well, time for bed." But now I wanted to tell him all the things I'd discovered that winter meditating in the woods. "Ah, it's just a lot of words," he said, sadly, surprising me. "I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions." Japhy had changed since the year before, too. He no longer had his goatee, which had removed the funny merry little look of his face but left him looking gaunt and rocky faced. Also he'd cut his hair in a close crew cut and looked Germanic and stern and above all sad. There seemed to be some kind of I70 disappointment in his face now, and certainly in his soul, he wouldn't listen to my eager explanations that everything was all right forever and forever and forever. Suddenly he said "I'm gonna get married, soon, I think, I'm gettin tired of battin around like this."