SHACKS

One doomed mortal always trudged off through a driving snowstorm on a vaporous, gloomy, full mooned night - wolves howling and prowling - to hunt or shop or otherwise provide for luckless earthling #2, who stayed alone in the shack. One of them died horribly and the other went crazy and also had a tendency to perish eventually.

Crazy Alice was found dead in her rocking chair on the front “stoop” of her “hand-hewn, one-roomed shanty.” Her husband had taken off at night to find provisions(provisions are a lot more accessible at night and he remembered to wait for a snowy, gloomy, dark full moon with lots of vapor).

Alice was found with two squirrels, which would normally have breakfasted on Alice’s colon and tunneled up through other handy organs and which have a trivial life-span, rocking her gently, regardless of how long the unnecessarily dawdling search-party took.

The Mad Man of Monte Cristo, a gigantic,dim-witted school boy in the Snohomish County mining town that donated his nickname, was driven to dementia by cruel classmates and eventually escaped the little snots, only to be hunted relentlessly by annoyed, well-armed illiterates when he killed all their sheep and pets, despite the fact that they were all supposed to be itinerant miners. He usually wound up at the end of the Comet Mine, which perforated Wilmans Peak from 76 Gulch to Glacier Basin. A small pool of blood was all he left, although occasionally he burst into flames or was “swallowed up" by the vapor.

Most of us know that governments have a lock on “disappearing” people and that squirrels don’t refuse food so they can rock dead crones - and these stories were never retold without sweeping revisions born of memory gaps and really flimsy exaggerations, which nailed their howling defects - but they were believed, in their absolute stupidest forms, because we were kids and - the locations were right. You could go there - there were old boards and nails and trusses and porcelain shards, and some people on the margins just had to have performed marginally there. The tales,as we heard them, were frequently strung out, with shameless, magnificent dramatics, on location at the actual home of these ghosts. My condensed versions here have reflected these patterns.

Alice’s hovel was near a small orchard which overlooked the two-acre First Pasture in the valley of Purdy Creek, a Pilchuck River tributary. At the Second Pasture,further along, a path of side-by-side 4x8s offered access through a spooky swamp to the “Trapper’s Cabin," the tales and deeds of whose owner suffered somewhat from the cabin’s walls being plastered with Elvis posters. It stood longer than most of the homesteads because it was used occasionally. The “Crazy Alice House”was visited frequently for a good scare by the entire camp group, maybe 70 kids and counselors in the early gloaming, walking single file on the Evergreen Bridal Trail, enchanted and scared among the intimidating ghost-moss of hemlock trunks and vine-maple monsters. At the ramshackle site, after songs and warmup, someone’s performance of Alice’s improbable decisions and passing was submitted. My dad, who owned and ran the camp with his unlikely wife, my mother, was MC and a gifted storyteller, but he liked to turn things over to to one of the loopier and darker counselors he had hired on Mom’s criminally accepting recommendation, or to a brave, overconfident kid. One evening, when I was 8 or 10 or so, Dad drew my attention to a nettle plant by the shack(the very touch of a nettle was widely known to sting and itch til you scratched it bloody), while someone went on about the magpies(which don’t live on this side of the mountains)perched on Alice’s shoulders,combing her gnarled locks. Dad whispers low, “If you brush against a nettle, it stings like the dickens, but if you grab it firmly, it can’t hurt you. Try it.” I did not remotely believe him, but he seemed to really want me to do it, so I did it. I have often pondered the thin lines between sadism, good-natured jokes and lessons, while weighing the sometimes puritanical leanings of dad and his slightly unorthodox sense of humor. For example, he laughed softly when I was arrested during my first driver’s test.

Idiot Oliver’s shack was just above flood level on the Pilchuck River, by the dam which used to divert drinking water for the city of Snohomish. My first horseback river crossing took place between the shadows of the shack and the dam. I rode an almost legally-dead horse called Black Spice, which, weeks earlier, had slipped in some mud while under my command and fallen on top of me. As the river channel deepened, I floated free of the desperately paddling glue-candidate, but kept a death-grip on the reins. Anne, the Hidden Valley Camp riding counselor, hated me. Bad. I WAS immature and unattractively insecure, but I think her venom also sprang from my being her boss’s son. My parents had created this powerful camp out of very little, and she mistakenly thought we were snooty, rich city people. We were, in fact, humble, superior paupers. Anne grinned and said, “Make sure he’s under you when he gets to the other side.” Well, I was sure I did not ever want to be under this morgue-ready beast again.

Curiously, the strategy worked and I felt the great bulk of that fifty-dollar horse-byproduct return under me as I exited the slightly-raging river.

This site also hosted my first finger-numbing by a “two-incher” firecracker. I held it too long before throwing it at one of my friends. Same summer, when my mother ran over the head of our greatest boxer dog, Pooch of Portage Bay #1, with 11 kids, including me, packed into the offending GMC “carryall,” my tent group prayed for her on our overnight to Idiot Oliver’s shack. I hoped but did not pray because mom had taught me the lunacy of prayer and Pooch’s head had looked conclusively mashed at the scene. Another time, some of us destructive campers threw rocks across the river to shatter priceless bottles and jars,which had survived the passing of every mammal except little boys, in a small cedar shack.

There were more poignant marvels of nostalgia associated with the shack and the dam: inter-tubing above the dam with the odd but lovely daughter of my mother’s best friend and making out with my close friend’s sister on the actual shack site, the cabin being only mulch by then.

The green and the rotting stumps at Idiot’s were deeper and darker than any other place and the river flowed with more grace and ease than any river since.

Though Idiot Oliver’s story had escaped with the commensurate departure of my brain cells, I figured that Oliver belonged on the “went crazy” side, but it didn’t matter in the least. The site packed such potent power that I have never gone by the spot - with it’s mossy logs springing with huckleberry bushes and horizontal hemlock seedlings, dark shadows of its giant Doug-firs making it a constantly correcting canvas of such beauty, that I can hardly stand to even say it - without squirming in awe and fear that it won’t be so always.

All the sites are like that - the ghost railroad, the trapper’s cabin, the enchanted forest, Hurricane Ridge (where the Yar flattened stands of timber with his huge blue nose), Purdy Creek, the back pasture, pump house hill and the Indian campfire, many of which hadn’t even have earned official stories - have me in their grip. When I go there, I’m modified. I stay for awhile in a time before drug companies ads ended with “or death have been experienced”, before “envelope” was yuppied into “awnvelope” and coupons had become “kyoopons” and declarative sentences could not survive without each verb being ‘literally" enacted, before talking heads on TV were required to say “frankly” or “at the end of the day" before every dumb-fuck thing they said. It also predated drone strikes on Afghan wedding parties and predatory presidents who acted like the Cheyenne “contraries,” reversing the trajectory of every time-honored ethical deed.

These places had real histories, of course, probably featuring hard work, starvation, out-houses, disease, boredom, anger and death. This was fleshed out to me by way of an event you won’t believe for a minute, but that's your problem.

At 21 years of age, the last day of the last session of camp, loneliness already gouging out that vast quarry in my abdomen, I was in one of the homestead dumps near camp, sorting through piles of treasure - solid tinted-glass medicine bottles, old silverware, shoes, the occasional intact dinner plate(previously rock-throwing targets) - when I was approached by a boy, a young teen, fit and handsome with a prominent forehead, wearing brand new mud-covered Nikes and carrying a hand gun, obviously heavy on calibers. It sagged from his wiry wrist. Steadying the weapon with both arms and a raised knee, he pointed it roughly at my chest and pulled the trigger. I heard the report but felt nothing apart from relief about not being dead. I said, “Please don’t shoot me again; didn’t hurt anyway." The boy laughed, and said, “It never does. I can’t understand it. I keep murdering ’news’ but they just don’t murder.” ”

“Then why keep doing this?” A Deliverance banjo boy, he required disarming.

“It’s my chore, shootin’ ‘news’. I tried whacking them with a shovel. Same result. ”

“News? Like unfamiliar? How does one find a ‘new’?”

“Shoes first, like these,” pointing to his Nikes. My look held the question. “Sometimes I sneak 'em when they go swimming. Also, they stink, nothing personal.”

I introduced myself as “Jodie” a well-used nickname co-opted by my aunt from Johnny Taylor’s epic song of cheating women, “Jodie’s Got Your Girl and Gone," in place of the completely un-formidable “James”, with which I came to Earth. The boy was Caleb. He said he lived a couple miles down the logging road near where the old “donkey engine” sat,a huge machine that, decades ago, had yarded old-growth logs through the woods to a “landing” to be horse-dragged along to the railroads, which marked the path to Everett, and were there reduced to houses for the early white trash that staggered into Western Washington in search of (Dodge) RAM outlets. Some of the timber was dumped into Possession Sound in huge log booms and towed by tug boats down to Seattle and Tacoma.

The “donkey” was colossal, greasy and rusted, sitting up high on two gigantic fir logs, and since we weren’t supposed climb on it, we did. It held nothing of the fascination, chilling and heart rending bearing of the homestead shacks, but allowed a crass excitement which barged into our eager little brains by way of stories of explosions, fist-fights, whale-size logs and arguments about who is more inbred.

Caleb was was a popular name in the 19th, early 20th century. Everybody had Caleb relatives, grandfathers, maybe uncles.

Caleb said,“The donkey’s running today, but I snuck out.” I knew I could prove him wrong by walking out there with him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to encourage or legitimize his fantasies any more.

“The “donkey?" What do you know about that?"

“It was a wreck when dad found it. He came out here when the cities burned. He worked months to get it running."

“What about school?” I asked, playing for time, working on his delusions.

“Momma learns us. She knows ‘bout everything. But she don’t understand ‘news.” She says that daddy, Amos, is ,mostly exaggerating about them.

“Where do ‘news’ come from?” I tried.

“You should know. You a ‘new.’”

The vine maples shimmered orange and more in the shadows, the gold standard for Pacific Northwest autumn. It seemed awfully early for their their 4-shade domination of fall, which they ruled from little thickets on mountain slopes and breaks in timber stands, but then, the tyranny of global heating had been remodeling nature for awhile. The sun broke up in the uncommonly pendulous-looking apple trees like a cracked prism. I had remembered the trees peppier.

I listened for what I called the “assembly bird,” the wood-thrush whose call mimicked that military bugle call, “assembly",which, at camp, was the tune that tipped-off the waiters for an upcoming meal that it was time to report to Edna’s kitchen. I heard the high-pitched trilling sound of the cedar waxwing and assorted songs of other camp bird staples, but not the most recognizable overlapping arpeggios of the thrush.

A voice inside: ‘the location is right; let it go, see what‘s here”, although this boy did scare me.

I reached for my phone and Caleb picked up a rock in his left hand. Same as me, he was Wrong-Handed.

I said, “You already know that won’t work.” I held out the phone which played a movie of my son playing video games. Let me shoot a picture of you.”

“Long as it don’t hurt. I seen one of those before.”

I laughed. “No, it’s just a cell phone, smile.”

I took the shot and started to hold it out for Caleb to see. I glanced at it and felt sick. The shape was right, but just an empty gray boy-shape, the background clear and vivid. The sharp-edged silhouette of Caleb was perfect, but vacant. He looked at it, a bit disappointed.

“That’s me minus me.” Caleb chuckled at his joke. “Your phone’s no good. Let me see that baby kid again. Is he your boy?”

“Caleb, yes, and I might have another by the time I get home if I don’t leave soon. But I’d like to talk to you, understand what we're doing here. It’s not another place I come from; It might be complicated.”

“Yah, you come from nowhere, right? Daddy said that ‘news’ would talk like that; try to catch me.”

“Your daddy sounds smart ,but maybe he’s saying that to protect you from something he can’t understand." A defensive posture came over Caleb’s bearing; his expression couldn’t quite light on anger, interest, confusion or mistrust. He didn’t like his daddy dishonored.

I asked Caleb whether he had heard of Idiot Oliver.

“Just old stories, like he went off to war and came back daft. Daddy says they had bombs that just burned up most ever’body and made the rest demented in the wars. Half the animals went missing."

So I asked him whether he had heard of Crazy Alice.

“From way back,there was a story with an ‘Alice’ they say lived hereabouts who drownded as a kid, diving for one of those cell phone things she dropped in the creek.”

The expression “My blood ran cold” doesn't make sense. Mine did.

Recall for a moment your dentist, looking too long at the x-rays ,meaning, “Serious, compound root canals, needs solid diamond implants, go check his bank balance and credit rating.”

Same feeling.

I said,” Do you have a cell phone?”

“No, hers was the last one we found around here.”

I said, “Humor me. Why do you call us “news?”

“Ever’thing you got is new.”

Questioned further, the Old Ghost Railroad had been a “diesel,” and the Mad Man of Monte Cristoe had been a hermit who “wrote code.” Skipping back,‘The Raging Rat-man of Rock Island’ had “rode the rails with Woody Guthrie” and ‘The Trapper’ had taught Jim Bowie how to play ‘mumbly peg.’ Crazy Alice had some of her squirrel-whispering talent intact in

Caleb’s version, but she also planted kale and “smoked ropeweed.”

Generation dosey doe.

He wasn’t making this up for me. I knew; I made stuff up. It didn't work like this.

Despite the comfort of warm sunshine in a completely recognizable scene, I’d lost my balance. Place and time had been more functional as long as the past tense sort-of worked. But if Caleb was not lying or playing me, the paradigm had twisted and folded.

Now I knew zero. Time was gone and place was fading.

Except one thing.

Caleb narrowed his eyes, eyes I knew, irises hazel in color,set high. He said “You OK?You look bad.” He had softened.

He knew something too. He saw something.

“I’m OK; gotta go. Will you meet me again next week?”

“Sure, long as I can get away for a day.”

“I’ll look for you."

As I walked back through camp, I felt dazed, weak. I couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t tell anybody. A shrink would say, “And how did you feel about that?”

Maybe, after further hallucination, I’d get the thread of the riddles. I bought a beer at the Lake Roesiger store and drank it across from the fire station. I was in a hurry to get back to my pregnant wife and I couldn’t quite sort out the day.

One week later, the hospital staff rushed me to an over-lit room. Everybody was masked and gloved and the light made everything appear like an 80 inch demo TV at Best Buy. A doctor deftly removed a baby from my wife’s private parts with some difficulty due to a rather large head.

I sobbed, she sobbed, the young man had all his fingers and toes.

“Have you set on a name?” I squeaked.

“If it’s OK, my grandfather’s middle name,” she said.

“AMOS”