Desolation Peak

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Wide ink-and-watercolor view of a tiny lookout cabin on a stone promontory above a sea of clouds, distant blue peaks, a small lone figure beside it. — A brown box of a cabin above the clouds

Intimate ink-and-watercolor view of a flannel-shirted man sitting on a clifftop with a tin cup of tea, sunset reddening distant snowfields behind him. — He drank his tea and watched the snow turn red

Mid-distance ink-and-watercolor view of a man with a loaded rucksack walking down a misty trail as pale peaks dissolve into white behind him. — Down the long trail, peaks drawing back

The North Cascades in late spring were still a kingdom of ice when I signed on for the fire-watch job and climbed in with a string of pack mules led by a hard-bitten ranger named Martin. The trail rose through old avalanche slash and huckleberry meadows, then into cliff country where the snow lay hip-deep and the mules balked at the log bridges. I rode in a kind of dumb awe, a city boy suddenly on a mountain that jutted up to scrape the belly of the sky. At the end of the second day we came over a high saddle and there it was: a little brown box of a cabin balanced on a stone promontory above a sea of clouds, with the whole Northern Wilderness roaring off into the blue distance. Martin unloaded my supplies, wished me luck in his way, and turned back down the trail with his animals, and I was alone.

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I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all.

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The first week I almost went mad with the hush. There was no one to talk to, no radio but the one in the corner for calling in fires, no sound but the wind and the slow complaint of a blue grouse and once a far-off jet. I read all my paperbacks, made endless notes in a journal, watched the fog pour over the edge of the world like a great gray waterfall that never finished falling. I tried to fast on water for three days and gave up in a sweat, but by the second week something had cracked open in me, or maybe closed up tight, and the silence stopped being an enemy and became a room I could sit in. I saw the void. I had read about the void in the books of the wise men of India and China, and now suddenly I knew it was not a thing of horror at all but a thing of pure clean rest, the bottom of the bucket where all the water settles, the place the arrow comes from.

The days lengthened into a strange, sweet, looping eternity. In the morning I would climb the tower with the binoculars and sweep the four horizons for any wisp of smoke. Then I would sit on the cliff with a cup of tea, watching the shadows of clouds move over the ridges far below, and the mountains would be so many, and so old, and so indifferent, that I would feel my whole life as a small warm coal in the palm of a giant. I saw a weasel kill a mouse in the rocks under the cabin and thought: that is the sermon for today. I saw the sun set behind Mount Baker and turn the snowfields to red. I saw the moon rise, fat and yellow, and a thousand cold stars swim up out of the Pacific. I read D. T. Suzuki and did not understand him and did not need to. I wrote a thousand lines of bad poetry. I laughed for no reason, cried for no reason, and slept like a baby in the warm loft of the lookout, with the whole diamond sky turning slowly above my head.

At the end of the summer the ranger came up to relieve me, and I packed my bedroll and my notebooks and began the long walk down. The mists closed around me, the peaks I had lived among for so long drew back into the white like shy gods, and I felt as if I were walking out of a dream I had not known I was having. Down in the valley, in a saloon, I drank a glass of beer with a sad poet and a few loggers and felt the world of men return to me like a tide. But the mountain had gone inside me and would not come out. Everything from now on, I understood, would be measured against the silence of that high cabin in the clouds. The road went on, the years went on, and somewhere in me a small fire was still burning in the lookout, watching, watching.