When the frosts came and the katydids didn’t anymore, the nights fell strangely silent. Then a new sound took over the night—the rush of thousands of oak and maple leaves swept by wind. Never having seen a northeastern fall and its many hardwood hues, he thought of paint chips in a hardware store. The cottonwoods and aspens in the Rockies had not prepared him for an incandescent autumn in New England. When the colors faded in the shortening evenings, Mead left off tramping through the leaves and withdrew to the cellars of the museum.
His assistantship consisted of helping to curate the entomological collections in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, a resource Winchester had brought to international significance. After dinner in a nearby café, Mead worked for an hour or two, spreading, labeling, and arranging specimens, before catching a late bus to Branford. One night in late November, between mounting batches of African butterflies, he was topping up preserving fluid in glass specimen containers. More to his liking than jars full of yellowed, clenched, and bulbous-bodied spiders were trays of arthropods preserved naturally and perfectly in lumps of Baltic amber. A large body of work had been done on these gemmed sarcophagi by the great Yale spider man, Alexander Petrunkevitch. Mead saw what it had gotten him; this cozy corner in the museum’s bowel was no anonymous nook nor nameless cranny, for it bore a plaque on which he read in the gloom: the alexander petrunkevitch arachnology alcove.
“A fine tribute,” Mead announced to the general company, but no one replied, pro or con. He took down a tome on amber spiders and marveled at the many species Professor Petrunkevitch had found immured in the fossilized pitch of Baltic trees.
Reaching up to replace the book in its rank of dusty black volumes, he spied behind it a singular volume that didn’t seem to fit among the rest. He gathered it down and saw that it was a blue, clothbound record book, much stained and used, with manuscript text between the covers. He spread the crackly pages and read the title page, written in a steady hand in soft pencil: “Field Book and Journal: Volume Twelve.” And down in the corner, in smaller script, the name of the writer: “October Carson.”
It was late, so Mead put the odd volume back in its place. In so doing, he dislodged a spider book and saw that the entire shelf was double stacked. Quickly now he pulled down the first row and found a baker’s dozen of this Carson person’s journals crouching there in the pale amber light. His curiosity aroused beyond his craving for sleep, he selected the first volume of the notebooks and began to read. Outside, the first snow swirled about the museum’s tower.
6
October 31, 1969. Crossed the Columbia River into Washington State today, in a constant curtain of rain. What a very wet, green land. Conifer hills broken up by yellow maples, their leaves dropping like big floppy washcloths, ground to a brown pulp on the highway by the interminable train of logging trucks. These low hills are pretty, or would be if they weren’t chopped to hell for logs. The ships down under the high bridge from Astoria are piled high with logs bound for Japan, even though the chat in the coffee shop back in Hebo was all about the local mills shutting down—go figure. These lumpy hills look like the latest load of draftees skinned by a bad barber. My last ride was with a kind log-truck driver who pulled over in the rain, so I kept such thoughts to myself.
He asked what I did for a living, and I said I was looking around. “For work?” he asked. “Good luck!”
“No, not really,” I said.
“Then what for?”
“Ahh, something nothing,” I replied. He stared at me strangely, and I explained. “Sorry. That’s New Guinea pidgin for ‘whatever.’ ” I thanked him for the ride when he turned off toward Longview, and I hopped down. He still looked puzzled—thought I was on something, I think. Something, nothing; whatever. Hemlock boughs and cedar bark blew off in his wake, their sweet smell mixing with the sour diesel exhaust as he pulled east through six gears or more. I put my thumb out for west.
November 12, 1969. I’ve been beachcombing the Washington shores of the Long Beach Peninsula for nearly two weeks. Not many Japanese glass floats, most of them are plastic now. But I have found enough, especially after the great honking storm on the sixth, to swap for food at a curio museum and general store on the waterfront in Ilwaco. The shorebirds are good company, but this state has a doltish law extending the public highway system to the beaches. I’ve seen pickups speed up to try to hit flocks of sanderlings and gulls, and motorbikers kick the heads of penguinlike murres, breaking their necks. My greatest satisfaction wasn’t the eight-inch green-glass float I found in a wadge of kelp, but watching a pickup marooned in the wet sand with the tide coming in way out on Leadbetter Point. The driver got out; the truck did not. I tried to help him get unstuck, but it was futile. I gave him a shot of Teacher’s and we drank silently to the sinking truck, his loss, the sanderlings’ and clams’ gain. I’m on their side, but I felt a little sorry for him in spite of myself. It was a nice truck.
My cynicism may be coming home to roost these days because other than the one glass ball, I’ve found nothing of value for three days other than the clean sea air, peace, and tranquillity when the beach traffic is at bay. Plus sunsets of lead and copper that no scrap dealer could ever afford. I think I’ll head north.
November 13. My ride around Willapa Bay came in an oyster truck. When I told the driver I loved oysters, he said he hoped I like zinc. Why, I asked? “ ’Cuz the fishermen is turning up radioactive zinc in the oysters here,” he said. “They say it comes down the Columbia from Hanford and around the bay on the outflow plume.” One day I’d walked over the peninsula to the bay side and poached a few at low tide; they were great, roasted over my campfire with a few butter clams. “And I won’t eat sturgeon from the river no more,” the driver went on, “not with the paper mill pumping out chlorine.” Silly me, expecting this country to be wild and pristine, as the visitors’ guide says. Blazers on the beach, the big cedars mostly in absentia, glow-in-the-dark seafood. Roll on, Columbia.
November 20, Shi Shi Beach. The Olympic Park beaches may be sandy in summer, but in winter they go largely to pea gravel and cobbles. Most of the floats I find are shattered. Backpackers clamber over the driftwood piles like crabs, sometimes finding the whole ones before me. I feel I have a prior claim; their packs, after all, are full of food. I have found a sign saying “No Smoking” in Russian, and a pig’s heart (I think), as well as a coconut in its husk. I cooked its sweet meat with mussels plucked from the rocks—red tide should be over by now—and a large crayfish I caught in a back-beach pond, over a driftwood fire in a sprucy enclave, out of the rain.
Latter-day back-to-the-landers and poets have built huts by a glorious spot called Point of Arches, where horns and hoops of black basalt spill a mile out into the sea. They asked me to join them for the winter, but I declined. I don’t think their company would improve upon the ravens and the black bears that nose around my camp. And besides, I don’t believe anyone (since the Makah left long ago) should live here. Well, if the loggers don’t roust them out, the weather will. They’ve built in a gully and will surely be launched to sea during some big storm to come.
November 30. And so they were. And so was my tent. I am cold and wet through, though never too hungry in this land that made the Makah fat in winter. Not that I’ve got the dried salmon, gray whale blubber, and eulachon oil that stuck to their ribs during the winter ceremonials. But I’ve feasted on razor and horse clams, sea cucumber, a ruffed grouse I got with a lucky rock toss, and plenty of late evergreen huckleberries and cranberries. The none-too-adept hippies up in the ravine told me there was nothing here to eat. For the most part they seemed to subsist on canned goods and hot dogs, for which they made periodic trips out to the reservation store in Neah Bay.
But now, roofless to the elements, they’ve left, leaving their midden of old moldy sleeping bags and tin cans in the ruins of their campsite. I reckon I’ll be gone too, soon. Even if I waited out the winter