Roughhouse friday, p.3
Roughhouse Friday, page 3
The other thing my landlords had left me: a stack of nine envelopes, stamped and addressed to the First National Bank downtown, where I was to send my rent check—$475 utilities included—on the first of each month. The nine envelopes were enough to get me through to June, when the fisherman’s helper, a white kid from San Diego, would take my place.
The only items that belonged to me were a banjo I’d bought off a teacher at the high school but didn’t know how to play, and a small stereo that I’d bought at a thrift store downtown called the White Elephant. I had one audiocassette that I listened to every night: Johnny Cash’s American Recordings. Since his death that fall, I’d been mimicking his model of macho nihilism, trying to see how it held up against the backdrop of the Last Frontier. I’d even gone so far as to dye my favorite jean jacket black, but the dye job hadn’t come out right and my jacket had turned a faded shade of purple and I probably looked more like a half-Asian Prince than the Man in Black.
I hadn’t done much decorating since moving in. The cinder-block walls were bare save for two items I’d brought with me all the way from Maine. The first was a certificate I’d been given from the temple in my mother’s village, after I’d spent a summer as a monk two years earlier. I had entered the temple with the hope that locating myself within the deep traditions of her culture, and stripping myself down to a more basic form, might soothe the strange restlessness that I often felt boiling inside of me. And yet, ever since returning to Maine, those feelings had only grown stronger and more violent, and every time I tried to meditate something seemed to bark back at me from across the still waters of my breath. Anyhow, I had no idea what the certificate on my wall even said—I could barely speak Thai, never mind read it. Already the corners were curling, the paper fading to a pale yellow.
The second item on my wall was a Hallmark card my mother had given me the morning I’d left Maine. I had been living at home, working on a lobster boat, trying to figure out what to do with my time now that I was supposed to be an adult. I had no desire to follow in the footsteps of my college peers, who seemed so willing—hungry, even—to begin purposeful lives in the alpha cities of the Northeast. A part of me wished that I could join them, but a swirl of feelings—a mix of betrayal and fraudulence, disgust and disdain—held me back. My resulting condition was a kind of numb and cynical paralysis, for which staring across the Gulf of Maine from the stern of a fishing boat from dawn to dusk seemed the only salve. And yet I knew that my mother had not spent the past thirty years of her American life working the night shift just so that her only son could stuff bait bags for twelve hours a day.
Just after the New Year, when my mother and I could barely look at each other without the gravity of her sacrifices haunting our house like a hungry ghost, I loaded my car with a backpack of clothing, a crate of books, and some camping gear and told my mother that I was driving west, to look for a job as a teacher. It was an odd declaration—I had no ambition to teach, only a desire to do what I considered to be masculine, physical work—and it was probably naive to assume that my mother would buy my story. In an unspoken way that transcended our common half language, my mother often understood what motivated me better than I did. The morning I left town, she’d placed an envelope on my steering wheel, containing four one-hundred-dollar bills and a note: I am proud of you, she’d written in her very precise penmanship. No matter what you do.
No matter what I do.
For the next six months, I drove south and west in a trance. It was a strange time to bear witness to my country: we were at war, again, against an invisible enemy that had no name, and all around me the spirit of the nation offered itself in blurry visions of duplicity and simulation. In Washington, DC, I killed an afternoon marching with protesters against the war in Iraq; an evening getting shit-faced with several young soldiers on their way overseas. In Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, I spent a night in an eleven-dollar casino hotel room, beneath the glowing, cascading billboard of Dolly Parton’s beaming face and chest. On a snowy night in Humansville, Missouri, I wandered into an empty public library to find nothing but a single computer humming and dinging with the hollow song of the bodiless, digital future. While wandering around central Mexico, I found two donkeys—one dead, one living—on a barren plateau in the mountains. From the Hollywood Hills, the blinking red lights of a distant radio tower projected a holograph of itself against the glowing grid of a smog-filled night. Occasionally, I made gestures toward putting down roots—an inquiry about an apartment or a job, a promise to be in touch—but I was mostly just trying on the lives of generous friends who, by some miracle, did not feel a similar need to keep chasing down whatever was next.
By June, I had made my way into the San Juan Islands of Washington State, where I stayed at the house of a college friend and found work tending to the property of an elderly woman who sometimes mistook me for one of the Mexican men who overmowed her lawn. One weekend, while I was hitchhiking around the Olympic Peninsula, a young Makah man named Daniel picked me up on the side of the road, assuming that I, as one of his own, was heading back to Neah Bay. As we drove, Daniel told me that he’d recently returned from an Indian college in Kansas, where he’d been recruited to play quarterback on the football team, but that he’d come home because he missed his family and girlfriend too much. “People don’t know much about us. They just know that Greenpeace bullshit about us killing whales. They don’t know that in our language I love you”—and here he said the Makah phrase—“means ‘My heart aches for you.’” That evening, after introducing me to his family, Daniel dropped me off at a sea-cliff campsite overlooking the northwesternmost point in the Lower 48. I gazed into the fading light of the Pacific, comparing my centerless, rootless life to Daniel’s, contemplating my compass of worn-out options: to go back East would be total failure; to go south was to retrace my steps; to go west, in the direction of Asia, accomplished nothing. Then I looked north—into a parting mist hanging over the Pacific. For the next several hours, I remained on that cliff, watching the mist, waiting for it to tell me what to do.
Just after the Fourth of July, I blew the last of my fishing money on a seventeen-foot sea kayak made of bright yellow bulletproof plastic and stuffed the hull with several canisters of oatmeal, sacks of potatoes, and bags of rice, and enough camping and fishing gear to last me through the summer. The only rule I imposed upon my journey was that I would swear off all modern technology: no cell phone, no EPIRB or VHF radio, and no navigational devices beyond a simple compass and a nautical chart displaying the nine hundred miles of coastal wilderness between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Glacier Bay. I was not without my models then: I imagined myself the newest member of a lineage of American men—Jack London, John Muir, Chris McCandless—who set off into the Last Frontier to cut their teeth on the raw truth of the wilderness. But I sensed, too, that my imitation of the past would never be exact. I did not possess London’s viciousness. I lacked Muir’s longing for sublime communion with nature. I felt closest to the angry mysticism of Chris McCandless—grunge martyr of my generation—but was too uncertain about the motivations behind my journey to claim for myself an Alexander Supertramp avatar.
The night before I left town, I called my mother, left her a message that I was heading out on the water but would be in touch in a few weeks. By then, she’d grown used to me taking off into the mountains of New England for long periods of time, but likely didn’t understand the difference between that quaint wilderness and the one I was about to enter. The next morning, I dragged my boat down an empty beach and, under a cottony weave of clouds, against a rippling breeze from the north, began paddling. The world that hung before me—a lush, rain-forested mosaic of islands divided by emerald veins of water—appeared like an amplified, inverted dream of the world I had left behind: a foggier, rockier coast of Maine, blended with the drearier, darker lake valleys of northern Vermont.
I spent the next twelve days making my way up the inside coast of Vancouver Island, sleeping in city parks, foraging for dinners from gas-station hot cases. I was still getting comfortable spending long days in my boat, still acclimating to the incessant silence of my own head. Just north of the narrows of Johnstone Strait, I stopped in a small island village called Alert Bay, hoping to find someone to talk to, until I came upon a phone booth in a grocery store parking lot. The only person in my life whom I could reliably count on to chat was my father. For most of my life, our conversations had taken place over the phone, and in some ways, I was more comfortable talking to his disembodied voice than spending time with him in person. Over the past nine months, I’d been calling him at home, offering dispatches from the open road like an explorer reporting back to his colonial king. He listened to my stories with voyeuristic pleasure. When my father was my age, he’d shipped off to Thailand, only to come home a year later, married. Since then, he’d been tied to a property that he had inherited from another man, devoted to a family to which he held no blood relation. His was not exactly a wandering life.
While I was waiting for my father to answer, a white sedan with a cracked windshield pulled over. A woman got out and began knocking on the glass. “Jeremy?”
I looked at the woman. “I’m not Jeremy,” I said.
The woman squinted. She looked as much like my mother as anyone I had ever seen: dark hair, copper skin, round face. She continued to stare. “You sure look like Jeremy.” I hung up the phone and stepped outside. The woman explained that Jeremy was her nephew, who had left Alert Bay several years ago and never come back.
“Not me.”
The woman nodded. “You’re cute like Jeremy!” Then she drove away.
That night, I paddled into the middle of Queen Charlotte Sound, across a dangerous stretch of open channel, and made camp on an island about the size of a tennis court. Off the rocks, the entire Pacific Ocean seemed to yawn and groan with its massiveness, and yet I slept soundly, on a slab of rock, under a crisp, star-filled sky. But in the morning, a storm had rolled in, and I woke to a fog so thick, so heavy and white, that I could barely see where I’d tied off my boat. The right thing to do would have been to wait for the fog to burn off, rather than risk being steamrolled by one of the giant container ships from China or Mexico that moved through the channel like enormous spaceships. The currents in Queen Charlotte Sound were strong enough to wash me a hundred miles out to sea. But as the mist swirled in front of me, that shapeless white world withheld an irresistible secret. I broke camp, duct-taped my compass to my deck, set the arrow in the general direction of the mainland, and started paddling.
For the next several hours, time obeyed different laws. Every time I took a paddle stroke, the dark water flowed by my boat, leaving me unable to decipher if it was moving forward or backward. I looked down at my compass, half expecting it to start spinning. I squinted into a receding distance, listening through the silence for any hint that I was moving in the right direction. In a panic, I began paddling faster and faster. By my map, the crossing to the mainland was all of five miles—but I knew only what I saw: that this was the fog at the end of the world. Then a faint shadow rose out of the mist like a ghost ship, and the bow of my boat rammed into a rocky ledge with a hollow, definitive thump.
In a shallow inlet, I came upon a rusted old barge. Two men came out from below. Dressed in logging boots and union suits, they looked like a pair of steampunk Rip Van Winkles. I asked them what they were doing way out here. Collecting cedar chunks for shingles, they said. Then the two men started laughing. “We were about to ask you the same thing!” I told the men I was headed to Alaska. “Jesus,” one man said. “You got a long way to go.”
From then on, I left the living world behind, as the remote coast of British Columbia—a scroll of empty beaches and haunted forests—turned more wild. I rarely saw boats. All day, I watched killer whales and porpoises rolling across the horizon, silver salmon slapping the surface, humpbacks exploding out of the water, then disappearing in a boiling ring of foam. At night, I sat naked at driftwood bonfires, carving little animal statues out of wood, improvising lyrics to songs I didn’t remember. I had stopped shaving by then, and had gone three weeks without seeing my reflection, and one night, after watching a pack of sea otters swimming through a kelp bed, I decided to smear Vaseline all over my body, through my hair, with the hope of turning myself into an otter. Then I dove underwater with a knife, thinking that I might spear a fish. It was weird. I knew it was weird. As I sat by my fire cleaning myself, I could only laugh at my strangeness.
When I did come across people, they took me in with a lonely generosity that I’d never experienced before. A gang of charter fishermen who’d been flown into a remote camp stuffed me with so much chili and leftover fruit that I shit it all out in the middle of a crossing and had to spend several hours cleaning out my cockpit. Some wealthy yachters from Friday Harbor got me drunk on gin and tonics and fed me massive steaks, before telling me racist stories about an aggressive Native man who’d yelled at them for steaming past a burial ground. “Me Big Chief Tom-Tom!” the captain shouted, recalling the encounter. “You get off my land!” A German woman in a fishing camp called Big Bay took me into her bunkhouse for a night, shared her bed, sent me out the next morning with bags of cookies. A drunk man in a cabin called me in, poured me a glass of white wine, then asked if we could take pictures together.
In a village called Bella Bella, a man named Barry took me in for three days. We stayed up until four in the morning, eating fried salmon with soy sauce and mayonnaise, smoking cigarettes, as he told me his life story. After being abused by missionaries in his village, he’d left his community behind to be an “urban Indian.” Only now, after all the people he once knew were dead, had he come back to relearn his culture. The morning I left Barry, I woke to the sound of chants blasting from a boom box in his front yard. The songs sounded so much like the chants from the temple in my mother’s village, which I used to hear as a boy and had later learned as a monk. “Don’t know what they mean,” Barry said, as he cut back the overgrown shrubs on his property with a machete. “But when I listen to them, I can work all day. Don’t even need to eat.” As a present, he gave me the machete and a hatchet that he’d had since he was a boy.
As I paddled into the channel, a man on a missionary boat with a crucifix on its stack asked me where my heart was with God. I’d gotten word that the boats showed up in villages like Bella Bella, lured local kids aboard with free pizza and video games, then told them stories about heaven and hell. “I don’t know,” I told the man. He nodded sadly, handed me a film case, inside of which was a small cross on a necklace. I threw the cross overboard, but kept the film case as a waterproof container for matches.
Three to four weeks into my trip, when I could no longer stand the feeling of being treated like a stranger, I took two days off the water in Prince Rupert, hoping to shake my isolation by checking into a hotel room. I sat up all night, staring at myself in the mirror, marveling at what I’d become: overgrown, haggard, sinewy with muscle. I couldn’t sleep, and I kept thinking that the walls were caving in, that the ceiling was collapsing. Around two in the morning, I packed up my things to sleep under a wharf where I’d tied off my boat. At sunrise, I wandered the streets, staring into windows of buildings with FOR RENT signs, imagining lives I would never live. Then I went into a Tim Hortons and was nearly brought to tears by the sparkling vision of ordinary people doing ordinary things.
That evening I crossed the open water of the Dixon Entrance as if gliding over a swimming pool. I made camp on a small island across the channel from Ketchikan. As night fell, several bonfires burned on the far shore, igniting the darkness like orange lotus flowers. I paddled toward one of the fires, until several teenage boys, drunk and amazed by my emergence, helped me carry my boat to the fire, where they toasted my arrival back to American soil with cans of beer. Then it began to rain. As the high school kids retreated to their trucks, a young girl came up to me. “No one here does anything,” she said. I could see her eyes glowing in the firelight. “Not me, though. I’m going to do something.” I watched her leave, then wrapped myself in a tarp and lay down in the wet sand. Several hours later, I woke to a smoldering fire. Without my glasses, I saw something so strange, so surreal, that I was sure I was dreaming: a vision of massive pastel-colored seagulls floating in the channel. When I put my glasses on, I saw them for what they were: cruise ships bobbing in the swell, little orange boats shuttling their passengers to the southernmost city in Alaska.
I walked into town, through crowds of tourists. I ate a massive breakfast at a diner called the Pioneer: biscuits and gravy, served with a full thermos of coffee. I wandered into the street, buzzing with a jittery sensation of being lost. When I saw a barber pole spinning on the corner, I went inside and sat in the chair.
“What are we doing?” the barber said.
I looked at myself in the mirror. “Shave it off,” I said.
By the time I’d arrived in Sitka, I’d grown tired of being a nameless, vanishing person, tired of eating rockfish, of sleeping in the sand, of being wet. The only contact I had in this part of the world was a friend of my godfather’s named George, who worked as a park ranger at the Cultural Center. I didn’t know much about George other than the fact that he was Tlingit, and that he and my godfather had become friends over their common service in Vietnam. “Heard you had quite a trip up here,” George said, laughing to himself. We were standing on the beach. “Those are some pretty big waters. I used to fish those waters.” He paused. “You must have had some help.” By help, I figured George meant something mystically Indian; later, I learned he was a Russian Orthodox Christian. When George asked me where I was headed next, I told him that I intended to paddle on to Glacier Bay, in the footsteps of John Muir. George didn’t seem all that impressed. “That’s where I’m from. Hoonah people. But we don’t go in there unless we got a reason.” He looked at my boat. He looked at me. “I got an old fifth wheel in my yard,” George said. “Full of junk, but a place to stay until you figure out what’s next.”
