Old Friends, Gone

A couple weeks ago another high school friend passed away, the third in as many years. We called him Easy, which he was when we started out.  At some point early on into adulthood things would become not so easy for him, the details of which I am glad to not know. One story about him from those high school days was when running from the scene of an infamous high school prank (today it would be called “multiple felonies”) Easy couldn’t keep up and shouted to his partners in crime, “Leave me to the dogs.”   Which seems somehow telling, as if we all did, in a way, leave him to the dogs. I remember him as a sweet, generous guy, and I’ll leave it at that.

But in the same week, another friend from my past left us, rather mysteriously, too. I found out on facebook.  No obit appeared anywhere, though the funeral home included a lot of photos in which at first I hardly recognized my old friend.   Comments at the funeral home website alluded to the end of his long-suffering, and this showed on his face in most of the photographs. 

I remember Steve Levy mostly for his laugh, which was constant and infectious.  We taught high school together for seven years and spent a lot of time coaching track together, too. Steve had turned himself into a high-jump expert.  One time we were on a school outing to Joshua Tree in winter and I cajoled him up a rock climb on a thing called Moosedog Tower (pictured above), which was ominous looking when we scoped it out in the moonlight the night before we climbed it.  I remember hurrying our rappel off the summit to get to mass said by one of the priests, Father Cronin, I think, the mass outdoors amid a giant rock amphitheater on a crisp winter morning.  I remember having a lot to be thankful for, not the least of which was not being late for Father Cronin's mass.  I still have a lot to be thankful for.  And, I still have a photograph of Steve standing below the Tower.

When I left high school teaching, I left southern California and I never saw Steve again, never kept in touch at all.  He probably never knew how much his friendship meant to me.  Or, maybe he did; I don’t know.

A few years ago (2010) I published an essay in which were included some remembrances of him and I sent a copy of it to him in care of the school where he taught.

Here are the pertinent paragraphs from that piece:

“Sitting out on one of the decks waiting for the telepherique I met another Brit.  He was sitting barefooted in the sun eating some dreadful concoction that he squeezed out of a tube.  Had just soloed one of the big alpine routes, I no longer remember which, and would be heading over to the north face of the Eiger.  He had done the north wall of the Matterhorn earlier in the summer.  His toenails looked like someone had taken a hammer to them and his hair was almost matted.  He was in some highly personal zone into which humanity did not venture often, though he was friendly enough.   

            During this era I taught high school in southern California.  I worked with Levy who, it turned out, was a kind of armchair mountaineer.  He had done a little climbing but not much and we were always making plans that fell through at the last minute.  Levy had been particularly enamored of Bonington, having read the first two of his early biographies—Bonington’s biographies a publishing enterprise unto itself.  I don’t know what it was that Levy so loved about Bonington--perhaps just a distanced appreciation.  Levy would ask me to tell him about the Alps.  And I’d mention something.  But his favorite image was of the lone climber up on the deck of the Aiguille du Midi.  He was like a child insisting on a favorite bedtime story: “tell me about that guy again.”

            Trying to arrange a climbing trip with Levy was impossible--he never came through.  Later in life, after I had children of my own, now for example, I felt I understood Levy much better.  I feel I owe him an apology.”

What did he think of it?  I’ll never know, nor will I know even if the magazine ever reached him.

In any case, I miss him now that he’s forever gone, in a way that had I guessed at years ago would have spurred me more strongly to get in touch. 

Godspeed, Steve, you were good man, and you knew that if there was to be a reward it would be in heaven.

The Axolotl in the Coalmine

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In my formative years (as if those were over) I took a great literature class at Wayne State University in Detroit: Experimental Fiction.  There I discovered Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar both for whom I have held an undying admiration.  But it is Cortázar for whom I have the most affection.  He is probably most famous for his story “Blow Up” which provided the concept for Antonioni’s famous film of the same name.  The premise of this story is similar to this video of a camera falling from an airplane, if the camera had the ability to narrate:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrxPuk0JefA

Or, maybe his best known work is his first novel Hopscotch which can be read linearly or “randomly”--the reader gets to choose. My favorite of his short stories is “The End of the Game.”  In fact it is among my favorites of all short stories.  It is features no speaking cameras (like “Blow Up”) nor does it play with postmodernity.  It is about, simply, childhood.  

But on hearing the news about the probable extinction of the axolotl in the Mexican wild.  I thought first of Cortázar’s story “Axolotl.”  The axolotl is an amphibian and the word axolotl is Nahuatl, and translates as water monster.  Commonly referred to today as the walking fish.  It is native to only two lakes near Mexico City, one of which has vanished completely (artificially drained to avoid flooding) and one which exists mostly in canal form, Lake Xochimilco. A four-month long search in 2013 turned up no surviving individuals in the wild.  Previous surveys in 1998, 2003 and 2008 had found 6000, 1000 and 100 axolotls per square kilometer in its Lake Xochimilco habitat, respectively.

I always loved Cortázar’s story, “Axolotl,” probably because it was among his easiest to understand.  In “Axolotl” the narrator becomes obsessed with an axolotl in an aquarium, until by the end (SPOILER ALERT!) of the story, some kind Vulcan mind meld occurs and the narrator has become the axolotl staring out of the terrarium.  Borges said, of Cortázar "No one can retell the plot of a Cortázar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost."  Thus, I highly recommend reading the story here in its entirety, it’s not long:

http://southerncrossreview.org/73/axolotl.html

Axolotls were, also, incidentally, a staple of the Aztec diet, but as we all know the axolotl outlasted the Aztec.  And we will outlast the axolotl, but one wonders, by how long?  I doubt that Cortázar could have foreseen the end of the axolotl’s days in the wild, nor that he intended his story as an eco-cautionary tale, but make no mistake: our days in the wild are threatened, too.  If we are the axolotl and the axolotl is us, we can look forward to a future inside an aquaruium. Tended by whom, I wonder?

Powderless

Sweeney says this is one of the two worst snow seasons he’s seen in 40 years of ski-bumming.  Sweeney is utterly reliable about these sorts of assessments.  It started out okay, but now I haven’t been Nordic skiing in about three weeks.  And I haven’t been at the resort at all.  Last year, also a bad snow year, I had been skiing about 25 times by now.

Who knows? Maybe by going light this year I will extend my skiing deeper into the twilight years.  Could be a good thing.  Besides, last year I skied well into June, so potentially there is a lot of skiing ahead of us.

Usually I read ski magazines before the ski season, or after.  Usually not in February, like now.  I’m looking at Powder from December '13.  There’s an incredible shot of Mount Barille in the Ruth Gorge by Garrett Grove.  It looks enormous through his lens, but when you’re actually there it’s just about the smallest peak around.  His photo shows the northern side of the mountain and it looks pretty broken up by crevasses right about at the spot we were trying to ascend the thing back in 2001.  It wasn’t crevasses that turned us back though—it was the deep sugary snow that we’d sink into as soon as we took our skis off.  It was like that everywhere we went in the Ruth and the trip turned into an exotic ski tour.  I wonder if I’ll get back there; the flight in has more than doubled in price in the decade plus since. What a glorious place.  I mis-typed place as palace, and yes, that’s good, too: a glorious palace.

There’s a short Neil Stebbins piece about hearing riding a chairlift and hearing a mother and daughter four or five chairs ahead singing Waltzing Matilda out there in a whiteout, in The Church of the Ascension.  And I remember one time very early in my climbing life when John and I were attempting Mt Washington on a col cold winter day.  We stopped for the night in a hut and we were cold to the brink of fear.  We began singing Waltzing Matilda, god knows why.  We were singing to hold off the cold.  It goes without saying that we were utterly alone.  We turned back the next morning.  A couple days later I soloed Mt Lafayette, the summit of which, decades later, Guy Waterman would choose for his final breaths on the planet—a deeply sad and moving story (see Chip Brown’s excellent Good Morning, Midnight for a well-wrought bio of this complex man).

Then, still the same issue of Powder, there is Porter Fox’s excerpt from his book on the future of snow.  One of the pictures is of the classic north face of the Tour Ronde above Chamonix and I remember the summer of 1980 when I first climbed there. A roped party had fallen high on the face and flossed off another party.  Six fatalities, as I recall.  After a weak attempt on the Brenva Route on Mt Blanc, John and I found ourselves on the ridge to the summit of the Tour Ronde.  After after tagging it we  trudged back down and then back up to the summit of the Aiguille du Midi to catch the last telepherique down to Chamonix.  One of the longest days ever: full value.

Further in to the same issue I am reading about Arne Backstrom’s fall on skis on Pisco in the Cordillera Blanca.  When I climbed it, in 1984 with Jim Pinter-Lucke, we were just going up the west ridge as a warm-up climb. We had gained the ridge from the north.  I never laid eyes on the south face, and can’t really even picture it.  In fact, most of our summit day was lost in a whiteout, although the summit was unmistakable.  I am saddened to think of Arne’s death in such a lonely place, but also, glad once again for my good fortune in the mountains.

It’s getting on toward 30 days without snow, unless you count the half-inch we got last week, which I don’t.  At least it’s cold again.  And we’re still getting up into the Chugach, but we’re hiking up in crampons and walking down boiler-plated snow, glare ice, and rock (that photo is the snowless summit of Flattop in the photo from yesterday 2/09/14).  And, there’s Sweeney leaving text messages: he still knows where there’s still a skiable line.

"Writer's Block?" Pffffff.

“Writer’s block” is the ultimate first world problem.  I deny its existence.  Laziness, procrastination, misplaced priorities: I am well-acquainted with these.  And, sometimes you’re (i.e. “I”) just not smart enough to solve in language the problem you have set out for yourself.    But “writer’s block?”  Pffff.

I was walking down the street in Berkeley the other day when I discovered a typewriter repair shop.  Sweet. I was able to acquire a typewriter ribbon for my Olivetti lettera 22.  Also, I saw the exact same Royal, with the specific gravity of a small tank, I used in undergraduate school.  I had typed out a line from Coleridge, my first literary love, and taped it to the machine: “Should Sloth around me throw her soul-enslaving leaden chain!”  The line come from Quae Nocent Docent, which translates to “What hurts, teaches.”  (Coleridge was very Nietschean, eh?).  Of course, if I was at the typewriter I was already not being slothful.    I should have taped it above the television.  But then, in the years I wrote on that typewriter I didn’t own a television.    I must have just been spending a lot of time staring off into space.

Nancy Please, the film by Andrew Semans (2012) appealed to me greatly, but maybe you had to have “been there.” It’s about a graduate student in English who has a serious case of “writer’s block.”    Thus, it’s really about weakness and neuroses.  But it’s pretty funny and spot on.  The guy “can’t” write his dissertation because the “key” to it is a copy of book that his ex-roommate is holding hostage.  Actually the film might function as a good wake-up call to anyone who thinks she or he is suffering from  “writer’s block."  Check it out, if that shoe fits.

Back in Illinois we had a priest, Father Pricco, who I think was not necessarily always a gifted speaker.  But once he said simply “Do your work.  Say your prayers.” Somehow, this was exactly what I needed to hear.  Sometimes it’s that simple. I’m grateful to him for that.  I think this actually embodies the crazy blend of Roman Catholicism and zen that Kerouac was onto (yes, Kerouac: still on my mind though my writing on him is done.  I am reading the Kerouac/Ginsberg letters now and once again Jack has me under his spell!  I cain't quit him, he gotta hold on me).

Pynchon.  Pynchon of all people.  Pynchon of the contemporary doorstop masterpieces Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon.  Pynchon who seems to have all the output of Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King and exponentially more linguistic energy.  Pynchon had, typed out above his computer (or typewriter—can’t remember which): “Eschew Sloth.”  I think he capitalized it, as in, one of the seven deadly sins, a subject he actually wrote about.  He eschewed it, all right; he must eschew it every day.

So, let’s go then, put your shoulder, queer or otherwise, against the wheel.  The page is blank and you are not “blocked.”

Notes toward an essay on Kerouac

                        Frontmatter to: "Kerouac in (and mostly out of) California"

Just in the last month, well after I set out to revaluate my own dwindling appreciation of Jack Kerouac at least four prominent Kerouac-related articles appeared in the national news. The first was a review of the Library of America edition of Kerouac’s poetry by Bruce Bawer in The New Criterion.  To give you the gist of that critique I will cite a couple of the more entertaining passages.  Bawer says, “the best way to get through Kerouac’s poems is to approach them not as literary texts but as private ramblings of the sort you might find in the files of a psych ward.”  Further, speaking of the Beats in general, Bawer observes “ . . . with their glib contempt for capitalism and mainstream society, their romanticization of criminality, drug abuse, and the tragedy of mental illness, and their narcissistic rebranding as virtues of their own shiftlessness and dissolution—they would turn out to be, to an amazing extent, the seed of pretty much everything that was rotten about the American 1960s and their aftermath.”  I was also amused by his description of Neal Cassady as a “footloose priapic young psychopath.”

2.  In the September 6 New Yorker Ian Scheffler researches biographer Joyce Johnson’s question: “Did the effects of cumulative damage to the brain over Jack’s lifetime contribute to his deepening alcoholism and depression?”  Johnson was Kerouac’s girlfriend when he showed up at her door broken and beaten after a drunken episode in a Greenwich Village tavern.  The beating included Kerouac’s head being smashed repeatedly against a street curb. Scheffler tracks Kerouac’s traumatic brain injuries, mostly from football, and concludes that most probably he did indeed suffer from Chronic Traumatic Encephalitis as a result of so many violent concussions.  The most prevalent of all CTE symptoms is depression, but also impulse control (which leads to substance abuse) and memory loss, which Kerouac began complaining of while in his late twenties.  This is the affliction that plagues former National Football League players who just won a ¾ of a billion dollar judgment from the league.  But CTE can only be proven by physical examination of the brain itself, so this foray into forensic literary diagnosis must remain somewhat speculative. 

            I am reminded here of William F Nolan’s essay on Hemingway titled “Last Days of the Lion” published in 1974.  Its second very long paragraph listed the traumatic physical accidents Hemingway endured including several before taking the 237 pieces of shrapnel in World War I down to the two plane crashes, both in 1954 that he miraculously survived. We think of the tragedy of his suicide, but Nolan’s conclusion was that he was physically exhausted, there wasn’t much left.

3.  The death in August of Beatrice Kozera, or as she was portrayed in the On the Road Terry, the Mexican girl.  She was 92.  She had only known for three years that Kerouac had written of their relationship. When the writer Tim Hernandez, discovered her, Bea’s daughter said to him “ “She doesn’t know any famous writers.  She’s not of that world.”  By that time, 2010, she wasn’t quite sure of his name “Jack, or John?”   She said she knew nothing of about a writer named Kerouac. After her death, her son searched her library for signs of Kerouac’s books and found none.   The passage describing Kerouac’s abandoning Terry the Mexican Girl has always struck me as one of the saddest moments in the book.  

4.  Finally Carolyn Cassady “ the grande dame of the Beat generation,” died just a few weeks ago at the age of 90.  She had been the second wife to Neal Cassady and slept with Kerouac, writing about it all in her two books Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal, and Off the Road, My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg.  She her the book as a “sobering corrective to what she considered the essentially unhappy lives of these men.”  This an assessment with which I will essentially agree in the essay that follows.

Although I do fully intend to make good on my promise to discuss Kerouac in California, particularly in the California as portrayed in the many iterations of On the Road, I will begin by disclosing that what I’m really concerned with is Kerouac’s influence.  That is, his enduring influence on American culture and his waning influence on me.

These are three notable moments in my on my road to disenchantment with Kerouac:

1)     Teaching On the Road to my lower division general education literature class was basically a disaster.  I have always been slow to teach books I love most.  Why?  I think that “love” of a book is deeply personal and hard to articulate. Some books I don’t even wish to reread (much less try to teach): I want the memory of my first reading experience to last.  I don’t wish to be woken up to the fact that I was sentimental reader, naïve, beyond belief, filled with youthful notions long outgrown.  I don’t want Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s prophetic line “Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now” to become an unheeded warning.  Suffice to say that in teaching the book the women students in the class were unimpressed by both the portrayal of women and the male characters’ treatment of them.  This is of course further complicated by the book’s genre, which is best described, I think by one of his earliest biographer’s, Anne Charters, phrase,” confessional picaresque memoir.”  I couldn’t think up an adequate defense.  Talking about this later with the writer Rebecca Solnit, she generously let Kerouac off the hook: “He was writing in a decade that wasn’t so favorable for my gender.”

2)     The late photographs of Kerouac.  How I wish I hade never seen them!  Ginsberg sums up his last photograph of Kerouac at their last meeting in 1964, three years before his death:  "Jack Kerouac on visit to Manhattan, last time he stopped at my apartment 704 East 5th Street, Lower East Side, he then looked like his father, corpulent red-faced W.C. Fields yawning with mortal horror, eyes closed a moment on D.M.T. visions.”

3)     The new (2012) Walter Salles’ adaptation of On the Road to film.  On the Road has always felt to me to be a particularly American novel, and I think the film succeeds in its peculiar Americanness.  And yet, I can’t erase, from my mind, just like I can’t erase the image of the bloated alcoholic dead-in-life long before his time, the facts of the film’s making: the fact that its director is Brazilian, that two of the three leading actors are British and that the American landscape filmed in Argentina, the interior scenes shot in Canada.  The America that Kerouac wrote about surely doesn’t exist today; I wonder if it ever did exist.  As the credits of the film role down the screen there are scenes of the Neal Cassady figure walking down railroad tracks in the desert.  These, of course, are prefiguring his death just one year before Kerouac’s own death at 47, in his mothers’ home of internal bleeding which was complicated by cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking.  He was drinking a glass of whiskey and malt liquor and writing notes about his father’s print shop when the bleeding began.

Journal: Nepal, October 6, 2012

Saturday, October 6, 2012  Overland from Kathmandu to Syange

7:00 a.m.  We, that is––the staff–– load the equipage to the top of Toyota Land Cruiser.  In addition to Karma [our Sherpa guide] we have a driver and two porters.  None of these people have names; we must be on a need-to-know basis (a vestige of the caste system?).

            We begin winding our way on nameless roads, stopping for gas coupons, then gas, and then we’re out of the city on a paved road.  Our driver is good, but it’s still scary between the other manic drivers and steep roadsides.  We only see one truck overturned on the road, its rice bag cargo stacked alongside like sandbags against a flood.

            We stop to stretch our legs, the stop dragging on until we suspect that the driver has some unstated personal business in the village.  Other trekkers are stopped here as well.  A long fruit and vegetable stand lines the road, its roof of blue plastic tarps held in place by logs.

            In Beshihar we stop again for lunch this time and again the driver disappears , this time we laterare told there is some mechanical-related problem that he is working on. In Beshihar the trekkers are walking through town and it sinks in that the road we are driving on is the actual Annapurna Circuit for trekkers (here navigable by vehicle).  Not very appealing for walking, it’s highly–rutted with lots of water.

            From Beshihar the road is a rocky roller coaster ride and I doubt we get above ten miles per hour very often.  Sleep is impossible. (Note: I have been asleep for much of the seven-hour drive up to this point).

            Lots of domestic animals on the road.  Women carrying gargantuan stacks of greenery (what is it?) much larger than their small thin bodies.  The little teahouses begin to appear regularly & I can see now the casualness of the planning borne out: here, or there, no difference.

            By the time I get to Syange I am done—between the car-sickness (inevitable) and the bug in my stomach, (not to mention the mélange of drugs ingested to combat both), I go straight to sleep (5:30 p.m.?).

            In the dining room of the teahouse waiting for Karma to arrange for the rooms.  A team of porters is watching a soccer match on television in rapt silence.  I don’t remember this until the next morning when I am trying to sort dream from reality.

            Karma awakens me (when?) to look at my down jacket to assess whether it will keep me warm at 6,000 meters.  I think he says it will be insufficient but I insist it will be fine.

            John is in and out of the room, his headlamp moving around the room like night burglar or underwater explorer.

            My dreams are vivid and somewhat Macomb-based, though I couldn’t say what about them had anything to do with Macomb [a town in the Midwest I moved away from four years prior].  They included: a large party uncomfortably over-crowded with people, being told we won a million dollars and then having it not be true.  Finally, a conversation with my father [passed away six months prior] in which he inquires whether I have bargained hard enough for my salary in a job interviewer- (it is unclear whether this is anew job or some past job).

            All night the river rushes through my dreams and in the morning I see that our tea house is perched over the it and we are staying at the New Waterfall Teahouse, Syange, Room 114.

            The trekkers have been much-dampened, presumably today, and their shoes sit out in from of the rooms, tongues open to the air, shirts hanging from balconies to dry.

Final Ski Report: a Late Winter Encounter

I am lucky enough to been on skis just last week (June!). A couple days ago driving over Turnagain Pass I could see lines on Tincan Peak still holding enough snow for some long runs.  But I expect not to ski again this season due more to my schedule than to conditions. 

So I’ll perform a quick post-mortem on the season which began in October with the dream of skiing a Himalayan peak. This didn’t happen, but not for lack of effort, including mostly the effort of our Nepalese porter who carried my Rossignols about a 130 miles.  I had a great time at the Tour of Anchorage, the local cross-country ski race, and am inspired to race even harder next year.  The downside to the season would be the downhill racing season at Alyeska: just abysmal.  Slow and tentative. Maybe only once did I complete my two runs without crashing and burning.  Some exhilarating moments nonetheless. Probably I just didn’t ski enough at the resort to ever find mid-season form.

            I had a great day skiing from Arctic to Indian, a 23-mile day in perfect weather with Dave Ward and his daughter, Suzanne.  A long day and good preparation for our recent nine day expedition on the Harding Icefield, days of heaven. More about that trip another time. 

            One of my more memorable days of skiing was late season on the Chester Creek, an urban trail that winds through a sliver of wild land.  Sunday morning, early, and I hadn’t encountered a single person.  But up ahead, on the trail two men were stopped, obviously waiting for me to approach.  I slowed to a stop.  Two Native men.

            “Are you training for the Olympics?”

            “No, no, just out for some exercise.”

            “How much are those skis worth, eh?”

            This set off my inner alarm system, probably a moment or two late.

One was short, the other slight.  But I was on skis and there’s a kind of vulnerability there.  You could be knocked off your feet easily.  I am usually thinking about this in regards to possible moose encounter.

            I downplayed the value of the skis, which was in fact true—they weren’t worth much, but I sounded like a liar to myself, as I tried to explain.

            The shorter man said suddenly, “Why are white people such mean motherfuckers?”

            “I know,” I said,  “There 're a lot of pricks out there.”  This was when I noticed that his eye was swollen shut, blackened.

            “Butch,” his friend said.

            “This motherfucker,” the shorter guy continued, “I jacked him good.” And suddenly he had closed the space between us and imitated a powerful uppercut with a tremendous burst of energy.

            “Butch,” his friend said, “This isn’t the same guy.”            

             I had way underestimated Butch’s power, and, naively, not even considered his bitterness.

            “So, where are you guys going?” I asked.

            “We’ve got a foxhole out in the woods.”  He gestured outward at the frozen forest.

            “Where are you from?” I asked.

            “Kotzebue.”

            (For you non-Alaskans, that’s about 1,000 miles from Anchorage and no roads go there.)

            Despite the small talk, Butch was still agitated, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer between rounds.  It was clear that his friend was familiar with the role of keeping Butch out of trouble.  Also clear was that he was not always successful.

            “Stay warm you guys, I have to move on,” and I pushed past them into the morning fog.  When I got a few meters down the trail, I pushed harder, sprinted, and I didn’t look back.