Farewell to Japhy

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Two small hikers on a fog-wrapped ridge of Mount Tamalpais as a window of sunlight opens onto a pale, glittering San Francisco far below. — Last hike, the bay through torn fog

Ray pausing on the downhill path just outside a small redwood cabin's gate while Japhy turns back toward the doorway, both faces caught between gratitude and grief. — At the gate, no handshake, just goodbye

Ray alone at a small table by warm lamplight, bent over paper with a pen, a glass nearby, the room pared down to one pool of light in surrounding dark. — Alone with whiskey, paper, plainest joy

The news landed on the little North Beach crowd like a stone dropped in still water: Japhy was sailing for Japan. He'd saved his money and gotten a letter of acceptance and bought a one-way ticket on a freighter, and he was bound for a monastery in the snow country to study with real Zen masters. The last night before he left, somebody threw a party that spun out of control. Wine, beer, guitars, arguments about emptiness, girls dancing barefoot, someone crying in the bathroom, someone else preaching on the back porch. The whole gang was there, and we all knew something was ending that we wouldn't see the likes of again. Japhy sat cross-legged in the corner with his big grin, drinking wine, explaining koans to anyone who'd sit still. He wasn't sad. He was ready. He'd been getting ready for years, ever since he came down off those mountains with his head full of poems and his pockets full of rocks.

A few mornings later we took one last hike together up Mount Tamalpais. The fog came in thick as wet wool and the whole bay disappeared below us, then tore open in a sudden window of sunlight and we could see all of San Francisco glittering like a smashed mirror, the bridges, the towers, the ships. We sat in Japhy's little cabin in the redwoods and drank black tea and watched the mist crawl slow through the trees. He showed me his books, his sleeping bag, the wood he had split and stacked, the poems he had been writing in his careful mountain hand. We talked about everything we'd ever talked about and a few things we hadn't - impermanence, the wild mind, what to do when the love of your life doesn't love you back, how to keep walking your own road without getting fooled by the billboards. He told me the gold was in the mountains but the path to the gold went through the clouds. I didn't fully understand what he meant. I think he meant everything. I think he meant the Dharma itself.

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I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy crazy nights with nothing, and a confusion of the dawn with Japhy gone leaving me alone again, and I had a terrible secret intuition that I'd never see him again.

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I was trying to memorize him. The way he moved, the way he laughed with his whole belly, the way he tied his boots with quick hard knots, the funny old songs he sang on the trail. I knew this was the end of the apprenticeship. After he sailed, I'd be back on the road alone, or in a railroad shack alone, or in a friend's parlor alone, or on some mountaintop watching the dawn alone. I had my own path and it wasn't the monastery path, it was the writing path, the words path, the lonely whiskey-and-paper path, and I had to walk it by myself now. I felt grateful and heartbroken at the same time. I wanted to say something big and final but all that came out was good luck, old buddy, and thanks for everything. We didn't shake hands. We just said goodbye at the gate of the cabin and I walked down the hill and he went back inside to finish packing his duffel bag for the long trip east.

I went back to the city and the parties and the bums and the poems and tried to get it all down on paper before the light changed. He'd taken the eastern road to the old teachers and I was taking the western road to my own teaching, whatever that was, and we'd walk together in our minds till the end of the book. I could still hear his voice in my head, the way he read those old Chinese poems in his careful translations, the way he pointed and said Look at that whenever the sun broke through the fog. The dharma was being passed along now, from teacher to student, from mountain to city, from the woods to the page, and I was the page. It was my turn to sit still and wait and see what came, with nothing in my pockets but a few crumbs of wisdom and a heart full of the plainest kind of joy.