"Twenty-five a night, thirty-five for an upstairs room, but we don't 'llow no parties up there … not even no whores--understand?"

 

Yeah, I got it. Ten bucks more for being spared the noise, puke, fights, bed banging, and a shooting or two that was seemingly expected on the waterfront level; payable in advance of course. Sizing me up, the clerk leaned across the old mahogany counter as a ship's bell echoed from The Narrows--whirling overhead the big fan chirped, swaying--just a touch off balance--

 

"Tell you what, since that stinking ol' fucker brought you," he offered, farting while nodding towards his in-law, "I'll let you have one of our best suites for thirty-bucks. Like to do you better--can't, boss'd shit-can me."

 

He couldn't waive the fifty-dollar key deposit for an upper room either, no doubt, put in place to ensure only those of character and substance inhabiting such tranquil digs. Sweetening the pot with an offer to store my gear in a ground floor storage room cinched the deal...

 

"Second door on the left ... shitter's at the end of the hall," I heard him shout as I started up the stairs.

 

I'd only been in Alaska an hour and a half and already loved it.

 

Good thing. After three years horseback in the Rockies, the dream of living off the country in the land of milk and honey had soured like rotgut on an empty belly. Given the way of the world I suppose it was inevitable--the disneyesque spread of the Golden Arches and obscene mega-sprawl of our hedonistic dream metastasizing like a virulent, greedy cancer across the West, the wilderness reduced to nothing but government-run amusement parks with their fancy RV campgrounds, interpretive dogma bullshit, and legion of grim-faced lifers pushing the defiled holiness like generic peace of mind--

 

And they looked at me like I was the one that was off?

Hell, hadn't they ever seen a man on a horse in buckskins with a Hawken rifle across his saddle? Fuck it! Time to split, or I was gonna start lifting hair. Untamed country was the medicine needed. No--No Trespassing signs--

Freedom!

 

Yeah, I know. I'd heard it from my folks, from the ex that still loved me, and damn near everyone else--I was chasing dreams. Then again, maybe they were chasing me. My life had so many unfinished chapters by now it was reading like fiction in bad need of a rewrite. From as far back as I could remember, all I'd ever wanted was to be a woodsman--just a brother of the wind beyond the spin and brainwash shoved down our throats from birth. Thus far the notion had taken its pound of flesh, yet at this point staying on the trail of such an elusive and apparently esoteric concept as living like God intended seemed the only reasonable pursuit. Sick of dead-end trails, I sold my horses and headed north...

 

But like I said, given the way of the world--

 

I'd already packed away my tomahawk and big knife, now it was the rifle. The ticket agent kept insisting I had to remove the bolt. I kept repeating: "Flintlocks don't have one." However this was the '70's, the world was already getting pretty damn strange.

 

"Sir, we have to make sure it is unloaded and safe." Paranoia, federal regs and pretty girls without a clue. We went round and round. They hit the button. Security came running. Good--at least they knew how a gun works. I blew down the barrel, it vented out the touch-hole--they declared it safe--I got on board. My Mom and Dad down in departure, teary-eyed and waving. And me almost as bad in the air, every five or ten minutes taking a dive hitting rough pockets--the jet pitching and bucking like a bronco grazing weed too, scaring my half to death. Thank God for stewardess's--

 

"Hey ... yeah hey, howya' doin'?" She gave me a sweet baby doll smile, tickled that I believed my own mojo I guess. "When you get the chance this ol' hoss could sure use a Coke, Ma'am." Man was she good looking.

 

Whenever she'd come by I'd catch her eye, give a wink and motion for more.

 

"Much obliged ma'am," and I'd tip my sombrero as she turned, sneak in another double splash of Everclear from my flask, and get lost in her luscious form once again ... umm...

 

It got harder than I'd ever imagined--

 

That is, saying goodbye--lucky I'd painted the illegal feather on my sombrero as skookum medicine to make me strong, hoping the folks wouldn't cry--them trying to get a handle--loving me all the same, yet praying this escapade would finally get it out of my system as they finally broke down and the tears started coming--

For years now wishing I'd (as they'd say) make something of myself and go back to college instead of dancing so over the edge--my hair and fringe and feathers fluttering like a renegade free-falling through the matrix as I jumped off once again--

 

It was downright terrifying landing in Seattle.

 

But when a cute little mouthful heading home after summer with Dad took the seat across the aisle I figured, hell yeah, let'er buck. Turned out we both hated flying and loved the two Jacks, I was reading London and she Kerouac; her dreamy eyes dancing with the fire of an untried filly when we talked of things primal, and of being on the road. Good thing I had my flask. After several Coke and Lightnin's, brave from the hundred-and-ninety-proof hitting her brain, Little Miss Hey 19 stands up, and very politely informs the guy sitting next to me he would be much more comfortable if they were to swap seats.

 

By the time we banked sharp and saw Ketchikan twinkling in the wetness she was whispering poetry and making eyes as the cabin lights went dim--I even gave her a kiss when we slid into the pattern, the Inside-Passage churning, convulsing down below--

Trying different approaches we finally got lined up, screaming on the tarmac ... coming to a thunderous halt.

 

Umm, what an angel--hard and firm as I felt myself squeeze tight against her, the impatient surge of those wanting to get off nudging me on--my anticipation growing when her breathing went ragged and I felt a delicious quiver just as the line to deplane started up.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

“Hey Baby!”

 

Damn! Her Mom was at the turn-gate, and with the curt nod of an executioner, and even icier, "How do you do," stole her out from under me.

 

"Just fine, you old bitch," I muttered, watching the babe, her braids swaying like tales untold getting hustled out the door, mommy's finger wagging in her face. With the other passengers shooting me the evil eye I started humping gear, playing the stoic woodsman to the hilt. A collective sigh could almost be heard as I snatched the last parcel and portaged it out--

 

There it was in one great heap--everything I owned in the world getting soaked. 700 pounds of fur stretchers and snowshoes; traps and snares; a mix of satchels, packs, and trussed-up canvas held a spare set of wool long-johns, extra moccasins and socks, a skillet and pot, sewing and repair kits, a lantern and a few carefully chosen books, whipsaw, axe and cabin building tools. Plus the important shit--

 

My bedroll and Fields Long-Rifle, Green River butcher knife and hand-made tomahawk, beaded shoulder bag and Hudson’s Bay capote. Slinging my possibles, I looked around, strapped on my knife and felt better. To hell with the likes of them. I didn't need their approval. No big deal about her either, hell it was that sort of thing I'd just run from with the ex. Fuck it, I had what I wanted--

 

I was twenty-five, ten-foot tall and bulletproof, proud of the path I was on, of the buckskins, beaded pouches, sheaths, knives and tomahawks I'd made; serious about the skills I possessed, my beliefs--

 

"Just a pain in the ass anyway," I muttered as I watched other peoples family, friends, and lovers, some now hand in hand.

 

Flagging a cab, I asked the price to the mainland. The cabby howled with delight offering a swig as he slurred, "Hell kid that ain't no mainland, don't ya know you’re in the Panhandle. Them lights, that's Ketchikan, it's on an island, and ya landed on another piss-ant pile of rocks next to it." Obviously tickled with being able to demonstrate he was indeed an Alaskan he offered the bottle again, "Kid, just picture a five-hundred-mile-long, steep-ass mountain range with all the valleys and canyons flooded, only the peaks and ridges sticking up." He flung his arm to encompass his known world--

 

"Almost as much water 'round here as when Noah was alive. Hell, ya see all this rain. Forty days ain't shit. Good thing ya got that umbrella on your head," he said, pointing to my big gray sombrero. "Where'd you come from anyway? You look like ya took a wrong turn somewhere around 1850."

 

"Weren't a wrong turn," I shot back, my sombrero beginning to sag, "Modern man is blazing that trail just fine without me," but took no offense as I hunched down for another nip, feeling it burn all the way to my center--and shuttered passing the bottle back, "So what’s the cost?"

 

"Depends," he said, lighting up a cig. Caching the whiskey between his legs he held up some fingers. "Ya can swim the Inside-Passage, well, at least the Tongass Narrows part, that won't cost you nothing," he said, snorted and bent a dirty stub down, "Or, fora' buck ya can wait till the morning flight for the next bus ," and then another as if I needed help with the math. At that he couldn’t help himself and erupted in laughter watching me get soaked. With one finger left he wiped his nose with his counting hand, inhaled, rolled it down and spit a lugi any one would be proud of. "Or, if neither of those suit you, ya can hire my services for fifteen smackers and get the fuck outta' the rain--besides I got connections if you're looking for a place to stay." With that he bent the last digit down. Seeing I wasn't amused he added, "Hell kid, how's twelve sound," and passed the bottle again. "You should've got on that motherfuckin' bus earlier, that's it for the night. This is Alaska, Kid, there's only two flights, that was the last 'till tomorrow."

 

I hadn't wanted to spend money on a cab, I didn't have much, and yes, I knew I was in the panhandle, that is, Southeast Alaska with its almost impenetrable canopy of granddaddy conifers and thousand-year-old cedar choking the ragged coastline--this was just the only place I'd ever been that involved not just a cab, but a friggin' ferry to get to town from the airport.

 

Oh well--fuck it--it's only money--

 

And off we went, the roadway laying out in the shine of headlights a shimmering blacktop ribbon weaving through the enchanted forest. The cabby talking the whole time while we sped though the habitable middle earth. That part of the towering Northern rain forest laying below the constant scud of clouds, along the magic hobbit pathway through ten-thousand shades of green downward to and including the primordial beach at sea.

Throwing the roach we screeched onto the rain soaked pier to await the rickety barge. The old tub having been used for decades between the islands--Gravina, on which the airport was, and from across the narrows Revillagigedo with the glow of Ketchikan shining through the spruce and hemlock in the thickening shroud of night, the lonesome foghorns and rusty old channel-buoys clanging on the water--the defroster squealing, regurgitating warm, fetid air.

 

It wasn't pretty. I didn't own deodorant, but with the sweet, smoky smell of my buckskins reckoned I wasn't nearly as rank as my noble hack, and worse, every so often, like a sewer rat's putrid breath, his foul inner workings would rear their ugly head to bite us on the nose. Finally boarding, we started across--the sensual tang of the rising tide a sweet reprieve. Amazingly, through it all the cabby kept up the chatter like he didn't have a need to breathe, even as we skidded down the ramp onto Ketchikan's temporary pier. It seems during the height of tourist season one of the big ferries used for the run from Seattle to Skagway had come to port, offloaded and then departed with most of the dock in tow. Apparently a deckhand was a bit hung-over and instead of casting the aft-lines, held the belay. Opps.

 

"So you’re looking for a place to stay you say. Well you're in luck kid, I know this town, and like I said I got connections, I can get you a deal," the stinking ol' cabby reiterated. His brother-in-law just happening to clerk a hotel front desk even as we drove into town.

"Well, cuss me for a Kiowa." Hmm.

Hemmed-in on the narrow bench and scaling up the mountain The Gateway City could boast pseudo-suburbs on the outlying inlets, high-ground, and coves, yet as it laid out before me, this, the weathered old-time heart, suited me just fine--

 

The Tongass and Cape Fox Tlingit Indians had used the mouth of Ketchikan Creek as a fish camp for millennia, but eventually the abundant fish and timber resources attracted non-Natives to Ketchikan as well. Finally in 1885, Mike Martin bought 160 acres of ancient untouched old-growth from Chief Kyan. The first cannery opened in 1886 near the mouth of Ketchikan Creek and four more were built by 1912. The Ketchikan Post Office was established in 1892. In the late 1890s, nearby gold and copper discoveries briefly brought activity to Ketchikan as a mining supply center.

 

In the ninety years since the first cannery, the town, much of it partially on pilings, and holding the distinctions of being the forth largest in Alaska, the rainiest in North America and the salmon capital of the world had spread for miles up and down the jagged shoreline--a labyrinth of noisy docks and wharves, ships and ferries, hopes and dreams: the conveyance of goods and resource--timber, supplies, people, fish--

 

Trollers, their outrigger spars put up for port looking like tall-masted schooners bobbing in the harbor. The smell of sawmills--pulp and lumber. Canneries, their dank, organic pall almost overpowering in its ripeness. Powerboats and airplanes--the float planes and amphibs as common as eagles and gulls. Dirty, peeling storefronts. Totem poles and ornate carvings . Grand painted ladies with their mullioned windows and turn-of-the-century cannery-row style. Everywhere staircased mossy boardwalks, cut through the looming rain forest. The bearded rough-cut gentry in their oilskins, hickory shirts, suspenders, tall rubber boots and stagged canvas pants swaggering about as if emissaries to a royal court--

 

A workingman's burg, the gaudy flash of Front Street with the hustle and bustle of night life playing out as we splashed to a halt in the vacant embrace of a old wooden four-story. Leaning slightly askance from its decay, with colorful bar signs crowding in on both sides, it sneered at the squeeze of progress, as if saying, "Kiss my ass, I was here first." Leaping the splattered neon reflections we strode-in, heroes of the Northern night. The odor from decades of smoke, unwashed spittoons, along with the fresh contributions of the gassy clerk, and some puke gurgling from the slack jaw of a drunken boat captain crumpled in the corner greeted me. I had arrived--

 

I was on the frontier.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

"Serves the best food in town, Mr. Stewart," the clerk assured, the lofty salutation offered with the practiced condescension reserved for those of second floor status, but nonetheless making me feel important in my young ass life. By coincidence his sister worked there--hmmm--the, "Just down the street," turning into a mile. Good thing I had my umbrella.

 

Hanging it (the sombrero) and my equally waterlogged capote by the old Monarch drip stove I snuck a look around. Fishermen and deckhands mostly; a table of Tlingits drunk and being silly drinking Tabasco on each other's dare slugged down repeated mouthfuls, chasing it with coffee. But nary a babe to be had--

 

Taking a booth I settled in still thinking about that Angel, tasting her hot, hungry mouth, the dampness in her jeans. Dammit. I hadn't even gotten her number. Oh well, probably planted in front of a TV by now, under the spell once again--convinced she was living free... what a joke...

 

I'd just rolled a cigarette when a super-sized ol' bleached blonde came wheeling out of the kitchen, wiped her hands on her hip-o-hips and zeroed-in looking hungry for new found graze. Brushing a stray lock of the big hair she was sporting, the old babe eased down beside me, "My brother called, been expecting you. What ya gonna have darlin'?"

 

Bummer--younger brother obviously, and skinnier--

 

Yet not wanting to appear cheechako, nor cavalier either, I didn't miss a beat and ordered something straight off that I'd only heard about on the airplane. Certain I was on the biggest adventure Alaska had yet witnessed I was feeling large. After more of the "Babe's" endless flirting, "Tobias, that's a grand name, but I like that you go by Toby, it's so rugged sounding--" and a couple more beers, I was convinced, seldom had the world known such an adventurer. Life was good, my star had risen. Satisfied, I rolled another Drum, basking in my laurels--

 

Then she brought the check--so much for shining stars and living large.

 

Thirty-eight dollars and some change! Jeez! This was a fishing town; halibut should've been cheap--especially just some friggin' cheeks. Shocked, I chugged the last of my beer, peeled two Jacksons from my roll and tried to sneak-out quiet-like, feeling guilty about the chintzy tip I was leaving--

 

She caught me at the door--

 

"Ohh, I just want to come with you, it would be soooo... good," she started moaning, smothering me to her formidable bosom. Slipping her number into my hand, she planted a big, fat, wet-one on my cheek, whispering, "Remember me when you get back to town in the spring … after your long winter, I bet it will be very hard."

 

Yikes! She was nice, but I wasn't used to being hit on by someone as old as my mom, and twice as big. Yet not wanting to be known as cheap, acting as if it was simply a matter of being flush, I cashed a C-note, left three more bucks and cut for cover, feeling more abject by the minute--

 

Let's see. In less than four hours I'd managed to lose an Angel, get soaked to the bone twice, spend more on a meal than a room--and so far all it had gotten me was staring out the window still blowing kisses as I fled into the night--

 

It was no laughing matter--

 

I needed to buy supplies, a small sheet-metal wood stove, a canoe and paddles, and shit, I only had the night and then tomorrow's before I'd paddle off into the wilderness--alone.

 

Oh well--it's only money.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Wow! What a party! Alaska was booming, pot was legal, and there was whiskey and women--although I was learning another truism of the North. Almost every girl from puberty on up has a husband or a boyfriend, sometimes several of each. Then take into account the male to female ratio at the time was about thirteen-to-one, including, I think, prostitutes and neurotic, I mean, exotic dancers (bless their hearts). Subtract the good girls home in bed, the old and infirm, the underage, and those just plain not interested. Add to the equation all the girls that move Outside (another term for the Lower-48 States) as soon as they turn eighteen, and that it was September, tourist season (such as it was at the time) was over. I couldn't believe it.

 

Picture a stable packed full of stud hosses with a couple of mares strutting around swishing their tails. Men actually crowding in to buy a woman a drink and talk for the time she allots you. Kind of like phone-sex without the phone, or the sex (well sometimes). In this manner the game rolled on through the night.

 

Men everywhere--from the remote logging and mining camps; commercial fishermen; maybe an air-taxi pilot, deep-sea diver, pimp, drug dealer, or hard-drinking merchant marine. Caught in the nightly drama, sundry townsfolk, drifters, and some two-bit politicians completed the cast. Seemed most of the waterfront was on a drunk. And this was Sunday. What a place. Dangerous almost! (nobody took any shit, that was for sure)--

 

Those in the company of a woman, or the prominent and well-to-do like kings of the meager harem, pontificating their trades and skills. In front of each, hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars strewn casually about as a lure. Made me look like a piker. But what the hell. The homegrown was primo, and most everybody friendly, some even sending a drink my way, seemingly getting a kick out of me just living my own reality. Everyone kept saying how they envied me my freedom--of how it'd always been a dream.

Yeah right--

 

There wasn't much law in evidence (at least none anyone seemed concerned with) people were just being themselves, both good and bad--yet with the thousands in cash scattered about no one tried for another man's dough. Shoot, their lordships could leave their money where it lay with not a dollar gone when they'd stumble back from the can. Most of us were honest (well, maybe not including the politicians), but it was more than that, human nature being what it is.

 

And as in the Old West, in spite of the insanity of it all, most everybody was very respectful because of it--with no one absolutely sure who was or wasn't packing iron--but with no enforcement barring the open or concealed carry of weapons everyone was aware of reality:

 

Right or wrong, act the fool and you could end up dead.

 

That night I found what it was before we let fear cram freedom in a ballot box. Granted it can get a little dicey--but if you think about it, life without risk is like sex without a climax, you just keep humping away. I'll let you in on a secret--

 

It's more satisfying if you go at it like you have some balls.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Drum cigarette and Copenhagen chewing tobacco, a fifth of Everclear White Lightning, tea, coffee, some canned goods, and the basics (flour, sugar, spices, beans, rice, etc) turned out to be more than expected. No problem--returned the canned goods and most of the basics--even so, thus provisioned I’d still feel quite rich for most of the winter with the deer and bear I’d hunt, along with catches of fish, shrimp, and crab. In the Spring when the tobacco finally ran out I’d be getting bushy anyway. I’d paddle back to town, trade my fur, re-supply, whoop it up and try and get laid--

 

Bought the canoe, gun powder and lead, some spikes and hinges for the cabin I aimed to build and bartered the deal for the following morning: the mercantile would send a truck to take me, all I'd bought and my outfit at the hotel to a cove twenty miles north of town at the end of the only road on the Island. Got done with the shopping about six and crashed till nine when the lure of the night finally hit. Shouldn't have bothered--somehow the girls still weren't impressed having their cigarettes lit from my flint and steel. Oh, it looked promising every now and then--

 

I think the sombrero and long-knives had something to do with it.

 

In and out, stumbling through the gutters of my lonely desperation I drifted from end to end wandering the town hoping to find a loose angel in the wet stormy night. Drunk and stoned with only ten dollars left to my name I'd stare from the bridges, the salmon thrashing and fighting down below crazed in their mad rush to spawn, wondering how far it was to the bottom. By the time I slipped into the Fo'c'SLE Bar I didn't even know why--

 

Not a woman in the place. Oh well, fuck it, I was getting used to it, besides like I said, I only had ten bucks. Then I saw him. He was in the darkest corner, watching my every move.

 

"Hey Ol' Timer, what you drinking?" I said, trying for a last little sip of largeness.

 

"Aye, ya ain't gotta' play big with this Ol' Salt, put your poke away son," he muttered, waving me over, the remains of an Irish brogue making son sound like Sawn.

 

He was as much a pirate as ever I'd seen. Long gray hair, scraggly and no longer a concern framed his horrible, scarred up face. With a patch over one eye, the other, a reflection of lonely blues and barlight took up the slack, staring at me with a steely sort of double-vision, as if looking from the inside-out and back again. It wasn't until then I noticed he was missing a hand and his left leg was crooked-up, gimp as hell, yet he spoke strong and true.

 

He'd fought in WW I, and smuggled whiskey during Prohibition. That's why he'd come north--on the Owl hoot, running from the Law. He'd been all over Alaska, trapping the Interior, prospecting the Arctic, guiding on The Chain. After chronicling his restless journey and how he took to fishing after the bear attack, he loaded a bowl, encouraging me to talk.

 

Never before had I felt small about my own adventures, nonetheless he listened as I related my few years compared to his three-score and ten of hard living, giving sign of understanding, and even offered praise a time or two. I hadn't faced bears yet, so instead told him equally grizzly tales, about the relationships I'd had and why I'd left them, including my pretty young wife.

 

"The shame of it is," the old man cut in, passing the pipe, "Take to the woods and ye yearn for a woman. Take to a woman and after awhile, ye be wishing you're free. I'll tell you Sawn, things changed after World War Two and it's just getting worse, now it's all about them, all about possessions. Fall in love and before you know what hit you you're a wage-slave for the rest of your life trying to keep up with the Jones. And of course you end up with kids. And for what, so they can do the same damn thing, each generation on to the other, with no purpose other than to consume, fuck and party--for why? It doesn't make a lot of sense when you step away from the picture, does it lad.

 

"It was different when a woman would follow her man to the ends of the earth, living simple in the woods, or at least the country, hell you needed a wife and kids then to help out with the task of just living. It's getting where there isn't no more even wanting to try to live free like God intended, even up here. New kind of cheechako in the Northcountry these days--bringing the same as what they left behind. Hell even the Natives are spoiled by it all. Damn Pipeline!" He sneered, his gaze going cold and raw--

 

"More paper-pushin' pisswillies every year! Manipulation and control. Education, domination, the trading of our freedoms. Fear. Safety. Security. To these we've lost our birthright son. What you're chasing--men like us, humph--we're throwbacks. No fighting it Sawn, not like a Grizz." At that he reached into his shirtfront, pulled-out and shook a necklace in my face--bear claws polished smooth by the years--

 

"And I lifted hair on Ol' Ephraim, or I wouldn't be here now, so don't be thinking I wouldn't count coup and take scalps if I could, but 'tain't grizzlies we're up against Sawn. It's ourselves lad--civilized doin's. Trading freedom for easy living. Easy money. Entertainment. Everyone in the middle trying to get a cut. And that's what women want these days, feel cheated if you can't buy 'em all the glitter. Most don't even know what real living is anymore."

 

Imagine. I was talking with a sure enough mountain man. He totally understood like no one ever had. And the way he kept calling me Sawn--so sad and lonely with a tenderness that was breaking from his heart was getting to me, touching me deep. I reached out to the Old Man. He patted my hand and squeezed it.

 

"But here's the bad part, as fucked up as it is, in the end, you still yearn for love no matter what. I'm telling you son, giving you some advice, don't let your life steal your life. Don't go chasing that wisp of smoke so long you end up too damned eccentric and cantankerous to ever fit back in, I'm telling you ... when you get old, love is the only thing that means a damn after you lived out your adventures." Again his eye roamed like the wind of a renegade dawn, and then bore down upon me in a long slow draught as he fired up the bowl.

 

"These are big medicine lad," he said, taking off his necklace and handing it to me through the smoke, "Beware the prisons we make in our youth, best be sure of the vision, before you're so caught in it all there ain't no going back," he almost whispered, shaking his head so sad, "Think of me every now and then would you Son--"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Couldn't help it--the claws clinking like medicine bones as I rocked upon the water. Adjusting my balance, I bailed the canoe, studied the book, and tried another stroke, feeling tippy as hell. It was going to take some practice, not to mention new muscles, but I was enjoying the dance. So what if people thought I was crazy for taking a seventeen-foot open top canoe loaded to a bare five-inches of freeboard for a trip upon the sea. I'd only been in a canoe for 15 minutes in my entire life before that day, but it had been the same with the horses years before, and I'd lived through 8000 miles of hard trail with them, so I really didn't think it above me.

 

I was a king now that I was back in the real world. Granted I was in the biggest National Forest in the Country, but to hell and be damned with their badges, the powers that be, the moneychangers, greedy merchants, and women too for that matter. I was born in the USA; that meant it was mine, right? In my favor they were a little shy on manpower for almost sixteen and a half million-acres of the king's forest. It didn't even matter that I was broke (I'd spent the $50.00 key deposit on weed the store driver had as we left town)--

Money ain't much good in the real world, it doesn't even burn for shit, and makes one really wonder a few months into the wild why you even thought to hoard it. But don't you see, that was all part of the freedom, part of the reason I yearned for, and for those afraid of such clarifying train wrecks in life-view: Civilized doin's offers little to those beyond profit--

 

It was so damn cool. Absolute. The pied pipers of our age, oil, the lust for glitter and that of gold had lost their clutch upon me. Well, I did have five gallons of kerosene for my hurricane lamp, but I was way beyond the mindset. No vehicle, outboards, or chainsaw. No thermostatically controlled lifestyle with its stranglehold of TV's and telephones, plus all the other nonsense given rule of the dream.

 

It was awesome. Reality in full living color--

 

Every decision, every action, even every moment carrying the full weight of one's own life...

Or death in the balance--

The wager so complete, so totally final, one has no choice but to transcend to the simple edict of survival, or become just another number.

 

At daybreak I cast-out upon the face of the deep--

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Dip, stroke, feather it out with a kick, dip, stroke, feather it out…

 

Like a sacred drum in the genesis of dawn, all around, the endless beat--

 

The pounding surf on the rocks and shoreline, my paddle's lonesome splash; the wind and water lapping, against the hull, against all of creation as if a primordial sacred song to a lover--

Her form rising up from out of the sea, a fusion of color and ceaseless motion. Even now I could see the algae and mollusks dripping in the ebb like precious jade and topaz, the waves rolling back, cresting a surge of swells, everything fluid, rippling in the rhythm--the waterfalls, creeks, and rivulets washing from her mountains in a mad, tumbling runoff as if the island were a Goddess continually being bathed--her emerald veil stirring, ethereal and mystic--the ancient Sitka spruce tossing up the mountain, as if the shaking of untamed hair on the underbelly of leaden sky--the four-quarters but one gray shroud of rain with no hint of direction.

 

Thank God for the oilskin poncho made the night just past hunkered under my lean-to by a miserable, sputtering fire.

 

In and out, across the inlets, bays and coves I stroked, letting the primal rhythm possess me, trying different positions, seeing their effect--stroking--breathing the wind and sea, feeling her power, the cadence drifting me like a wayfarer lost on the edge of time. Birds everywhere, on the water, circling in the air; on the shore, ducks, gulls, and pipers in constant hymn; the kingfishers diving to the sea to break from the surface with a meal wiggling in their beaks. In the kelp beds hundreds of sea otter put on being completely unconcerned, but they weren't fooling me, I could tell they were curious about the crazy buckskin woodsman tripping in the rain. Further on seals poked from the surface to look me over too. Then … Kur-plunk … down went their shiny eightball noggins, coming up at a distance to play the game again--mile after mile--the gnarled coast painted in breathtaking, vivid stroke.

 

And always the overcast, the rain, billowing, shrouding the island like a virgin wrapped in steam clouds. Her aura starting even with the thrusting of my blade, then coming to the shoreline, screaming ever upwards almost soaring, about a thousand-feet of the three-or-four-thousand to her swollen peaks and nipples always sucked into the swirl; yet below, open, spreading in a misty, vaporous abyss to the horizon.

 

To the one side, swells and caps, a fathomless dance to landfall brooding in the distance.

 

On this--cliffs, the head of fractured bedrock stormy, haughty with the parting of her seas. From the stony upper-reaches eagles perched and circle--the moss and lichen as if tapestries draping an altar to God--her flanks sweeping down on either side in a casting of shard and crystal ribbon … pure water falling … tumbling, cascading through her broken talus to crescents of untouched sand--the drift and flotsam an almost impassable barrier to the even more impenetrable forest--wet--succulent with its sacred spruce and hemlock, devil's club, ferns and berries bursting from the twisted roots and sphagnum taking every inch.

 

Treading, I held, gazing at her vision, hearing the gull's plaintive cries--just the two of us dancing--one spirit, one heartbeat--her froth and wind-sprayed wash dripping from my face, eagles screaming overhead--

The necklace clawing, rattling inside my shirt like skeletons from the vault of our existence, I swirled the paddle and stared into the mist, haunted by the kiss of an angel, the Old Man's words echoing from the lonely, troubled depths.

by W.J. Lynus O'Brien
written 1997 when I finally knew what I lost