Japhy's Shack

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 02

A wiry sunburned man sits cross-legged on bare floorboards in a tiny shack, a worn Chinese dictionary open on his lap and a pencil behind his ear, grinning up at the doorway; orange-crate shelves of books, coiled rope and a rolled sleeping bag fill the cramped warm-toned room. — He looked up and grinned, expected for years

Two men sit cross-legged facing each other on a bare wooden floor in candlelight, a teapot and two cups between them, books and crumpled paper scattered around; the wiry bearded host reads aloud from a page while the sturdier dark-haired guest leans in listening. — Talking till the small hours over tea

A small lone figure with a rucksack walks down a dark empty street under a cold night sky, dwarfed by pale washed-out buildings and deep blue shadow, head down, carrying away the night's conversation. — Walking home alone, never the same

The trail led me to Berkeley, and Berkeley led me to a doorway no bigger than a monk's cell. Japhy Ryder lived there in a shack tucked behind a house, the kind of place you walk past a thousand times without noticing, except that on this particular afternoon somebody mentioned a young logger from up north who sat cross-legged on the floor turning Chinese ideograms into English syllables, and I followed the rumor like a dog follows a rabbit. The door was low. I ducked in and found a room so stuffed with the apparatus of a free life that there was hardly space to stand: orange crates nailed to the walls holding paperbacks and journals and loose-leaf poems, coils of rope, carabiners, a tin of cheap tea, a wooden bowl with a few rice grains left in it, a sleeping bag wadded in one corner, and everywhere the smell of wool and woodsmoke and old ink. Japhy himself was sitting on a square cushion on the bare floorboards, a worn Chinese dictionary open on his lap, a pencil tucked behind one ear, his hair cut short in the country way. He looked up and grinned as if I'd been expected for years. He was younger than I'd imagined, wiry and sunburned in that permanent way loggers get, with the calm eyes of somebody who has slept under ten thousand stars and is not impressed by another one.

ImaRead2

He poured tea without asking, and we sat cross-legged across from each other on the floor, and the talking began. It did not stop until the small hours of the morning. Japhy had come down out of Oregon with nothing in his pockets and a knapsack on his back, and before that he had ridden freights, he had bucked fir in the rain, he had walked the high Cascades alone for weeks at a stretch eating trout and sleeping on flat rocks, and now he was teaching himself to read the old Chinese poets in their own tongue so he could turn their mountain verses into the kind of American English a logger could understand. He read me some of his own translations, the poems of a fellow named Han Shan who lived alone in a cave a thousand years ago and laughed at the world, and the words came out plain and wild and full of snow, and I could hear the wind in them and the cold and the crazy joy of a man who had nothing and wanted nothing and was therefore richer than any banker. We talked about the Diamond Sutra and the Surangama Samadhi, about the difference between a bum and a wanderer, about whether you could be a poet and a lumberjack at the same time and not be split in half. Japhy said yes, you could, you must, the poem and the axe are the same swing of the arm. He talked about Bodhidharma coming over the mountains from India, about D.T. Suzuki lecturing in Berkeley while the students took notes, about the kind of meditation where you just sit and watch your own thoughts go by like clouds, and it was all of a piece, the philosophy and the logging and the tea and the cold-mountain verse, it was one life, his life, and he was offering it to me like a bowl of rice.

By the time the candle guttered out we had drunk three pots of tea and the floor was littered with books and crumpled paper. I walked back to my own flop in the dark, and my head was ringing like a struck bell. I had read about men like this. I had dreamed them up myself in smoky rooms and on topbox rides. I had written poems to them in imitation. But I had never sat across from one and watched him translate a thousand-year-old hermit into American haywire while he himself planned his next climb of some jagged peak in the North Cascades. Japhy was the real article, a guy who had actually walked off the assembly line and out the door and over the horizon and kept going, a guy who carried his own water and cooked his own rice and did not owe anybody a nickel and did not care what the newspapers said about beatniks or bums or any of those newspaper words. He lived the freedom I'd only ever been reading about. He breathed the air. He knew the names of the wildflowers on every mountain from here to the Yukon. He could recite the Diamond Sutra by heart and also tell you the best brand of caulk for a wooden canoe. When I got back to my own room I lay down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling and I knew that from now on, whatever happened, I would never be quite the same, because I had finally met a man who was not pretending, and I wanted to be like him, or rather I wanted to be the version of me that could walk beside him without feeling like a copy.