A Long Walk
We first met Peter when he arrived in our dooryard one summer
day and started unloading a container-load of paraphernalia. He'd
shipped all the makings for a family reunion to Maine from San
Diego, and was camping out at our house to decompress afterward,
along with his wife Susan and their 7 year old son, Zak. Friends
of a friend. I used to ride shotgun with John, from 3rd grade
into the 70s, and Peter had filled that seat for the last 20 years,
out on the sunny coast. Another wildman out of the crazy times,
turned up on our doorstep.
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"Peter is a howl," John had said on the phone.
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Peter's rented van disgorged tents and camping gear, cookware
and supplies, clothing for all seasons (he was wearing a wool
poncho over a lurid T-shirt that declared something politically
outrageous, drawstring trousers, and woven sandals), books, artwork,
and armloads of apparently essential stuff. It filled the yard,
the doorstep, every surface in the house. |
"You'll love him," John had said.
| It was like the arrival of nightmare visitors from Hell. Our first
reaction was shocked disbelief. Our quiet insularity was being
inundated by an eccentric urban whirlwind: a non-stop rapping,
wildly gesticulating, passionately political, chain-smoking, bearded
wonder. And John was right, of course. You simply had to laugh,
and enjoy the mayhem. Peter was a wayward force of nature. You
had to let him blow. |
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Peter would keep me up drinking California wine, reliving the
60s and solving the problems of the world, until the bug eyed
hours of the morning, then be up sucking imported java in the
early light, ready for another hard day at the psychic barricades.
Peggy and I had no idea how long it would last, and were so punchy
by the end of the first week that it hardly mattered. We were
captives in a culture warp, and loving every minute |
| Peter came by his radical certainties naturally. His parents had
been unreconstructed reds, and their boy had kept the faith through
freedom rides, and turbulent times at the University of California,
where he'd hung with all the suspicious types, been a student
of Marcuse and psychedelia 901, and his radicalism stayed hot
down to the confused present. He seemed to have irons in a dozen
fires. A stick for any spoke. We gathered that he wheeled and
dealed in everything from antique cameras to junk cars in Mexico.
His prime stocks in trade were unalloyed enthusiasm, inflamed
humanism, the gift of gab, roaring good humor, and an urge to
excess. |
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Peter would write these hilarious convoluted letters about anything
and everything, full of twisted syntax and horrible wordplay.
Great meaty things you could carry around and gnaw on for a week.
When we all got computers and e-mail the fat was truly in the
fire. More often than not he'd pick up the ball I was bobbling
in these dispatches, and run with it, to some absurd or insightful,
end. He had a sharp jab for any self-inflation, and if I was taking
myself too seriously, Peter knew how to let the air out. With
a booming laugh.
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One Christmas season we got a call to turn on the TV news. There
was a report that some unfortunate children had gotten Barbie
dolls and GI Joes for presents, but the toy voice boxes had been
switched. The Barbies grunted, "OK men, lock and load," while
Joe simpered, "Let's go shopping." The kids were very upset. Pan
to the kids: Zak, and John's daughter Hannah. The perfect Peter
prank: hoaxing the national media about sexual stereotyping.
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| When we visited Peter and Susan and Zak in San Diego, their world
was just as dense and vibrant as we'd expected. Peter was warring
with one neighbor about his collections in the yard, and with
the city about his architectural attitudes. His assorted vehicles
were unregistered, and his behavior unreformed. A large man with
huge appetites, and a heart as big as your momma's stove. He was
intensely concerned about the well-being of his friends, and every
underdog in the universe, but never eased off on his own revs,
despite being way overweight, hypertense, and generally run down.
He only went full throttle. |
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I woke up with a start at 2AM Thursday morning and couldn't get
back to sleep until dawn. At 8 the phone rang, and I stumbled
to answer. It was John, crying and gasping. I couldn't even recognize
his voice. Thought it was someone having a heart attack.
"Peter's leaving us," John choked, and my heart sank. A massive
cerebral hemorrhage. He was in a terminal coma in the hospital.
I tried to find the right words, but they wouldn't come. There
aren't any right words. After a silent time in the morning light,
I took my thoughts of Peter for a long walk in the woods. |
The season has been yo-yoing again. It's snowed and rained on
that perfect ice since our moonlight skate, and the thaws are
beating the frosts. Daytime temps up into the 40s, and the river
ice is soft and puddled on top, losing thickness daily. The fields
are half bare, but down in the woods the old snow is still deep,
if mushy. I put on rubber boots and rain pants, a windbreaker,
then strapped on the rackets, waddled wide-legged into the trees.
Looking for answers, or to forget the questions. |
Chubby's Moon
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In the patch behind us hardened remains of 4-wheeler tracks and
ski trails stand up above the slumped whiteness, and frozen pillars
where ski poles compressed the snow look like miniature buttes.
Between glittering crystals the surface is littered with tiny
details: hemlock and fir and cedar and pine needles, beech nut
hulls, twigs and branches, carpets of cone fragments where the
squirrels and birds have been eating, oak and beech leaves, deer
droppings, bird and animal tracks. At first I think the peppered
patterns darkening the topology are snow fleas, the springtails
that so often hatch out and dance on the snowfields this time
of year, but as my eyes adjust to the shaded woods I see that
it's just old snow dusted with the windcast of the trees. The
dips are as dirty as road shoulders, and I wonder if the winter
air is full of dust. |
Down in the gullies CC sinks belly deep and has to swim through
the snow to get traction. My webs go gushing down and I flounder
across. Ice in the swamp collapses under our weight, and we splash
through rushing runoff. Winter seems to be letting go her grip
and it's all sliding downhill. Collapse of one season, promise
of another.
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A gang of nine crows lope and cackle over us as we stand in mid-swamp.
The last one circles round and caws me. I caw back. Sometimes
you can almost understand the patterns of birds, but today I haven't
got a clue. Just trying to be open to it. |
I navigate uphill to the grotto in Frank's woodlot. A spirit place
that draws me. The sun is bright through the trees leading me
south, but I get turned around in my inwardness, and have to circle
in on the big ledge, where someone once quarried in the quartz.
Maybe seeking gold. The excavated grotto is full to overflow with
meltwater, and the image of some subterranean creature lies just
below the surface, under the overhanging ledge. A mysterious visitor
who'll disappear with the season.
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Grotto Creature
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There's mounds of fresh porcupine scat pyramiding down from crevasses
in the ledge, and I restrain CC's enthusiasm. Up on the south
wall of the ledge there are green ferns fanning out in the snow.
We follow the tote road up to the powerlines. It's 20 degrees
warmer out in the sun, but a north wind is lifting, and I'm grateful
I put on the windbreaker. The access road is hard ice in some
places and pure muck in others, and I'm glad of the rackets, striding
along on top of the puckerbrush beside the road. The mosses are
a rich yellowgreen, and the young fir invaders under the powerlines
look frisky. |
The lines traverse a sequence of creeks, with pylons on the ridges
and catenary swoops of cable across the dips. In one drowned gulley
new ice has formed a skim overnight, which is now collapsing in
the sunshine, a shining abstraction at our feet.
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Powerline Eagle
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As I look along the lines toward the river a bald eagle lifts,
and spirals upwind, rising directly overhead. My heart goes out,
and I pray that Peter has a swift passage, wherever he's rising
to.
As the big bird circles directly above me, my neck craned back,
suddenly there are two eagles together, making a single towse,
the sun illuminating their white tailfeathers. Then the new eagle
slides off downwind, swiftly to the south, and when I look back,
the other one is gone. A passage of eagles for Peter. |
| I decide to turn off the beaten path here, to follow this creek
to its rising, maybe find something about sources, or exhaust
myself in the tangles. Normally I follow the access roads or the
logging trails. The strangled third growth will swallow you in
mud season, blind you in the rank green, or eat you alive in bug.
But for now the only shoeing snow is down in the bottoms, and
I want to trace at least one thought to its origin. |
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The creek makes lazy serpentines in the shadowed bottoms, often
creating circular hollows where the water oxbows around. CC and
I are forced to cross and recross the gurgling channel, seeking
out shoal places to webfoot or wallow. Logging roads descend the
slopes, ending in a big pine stump here, a hemlock clump there.
A few grand trees still cling to places beyond easy skid. Deer
highways intersect the looping water, with abundant fresh sign.
CC is fascinated by a set of big pawprints. Coyote perhaps. No
sign of hares at all. |
| Each time the creek seems to disappear into a tumble of trees,
or is blocked by a clay ridge, we stumble our way through to a
new gap, and hear the gurgle of waterfalls, where a ledge crosses
the way. The watercourse crosses the second powerline through
a cattail marsh, ducks into a hole in the woods, and snakes higher
up country. I'm sweating like a sauna now, with hat and gloves
stowed in pockets, wondering why I persist in such an errand.
The mush is deeper, the deadfalls thicker, the woods more oppressive.
One blind turning opens into another. |
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Falling Icewater
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Now the waters fork, and fork again. It's hard to tell which is
the main stream, the larger source. The land is flattening, the
meanders buried deeper in the snow, the course I'm on fans out
like a hand onto a level upland. Mixed hardwood under a few big
pines. I've been walking into the light, more or less, but now
the drainage drops off to the south and west, as well as behind
me. To the east I can see there's an opening through the trees,
and I slog that way, across the top of the watershed, and push
through the marginal thickets.
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| I step out into a graveyard. Bayview Cemetery. I suppose I knew
where this trail was leading, on this sad day. Out in the open
the wind is cold, freezing the sweat at my neck. I stand in the
entrance of the cemetery and look out across the bay to chops.
Where all the waters run to sea. I take off my snowshoes and begin
to hike the road home. |
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Peter died at noon (PST).
