Those afternoons, those lazy afternoons, when I used to sit, or lie down, on Desolation Peak, sometimes on the alpine grass, hundreds of miles of snowcovered rock all around, looming Mount Hozomeen on my north, vast snowy Jack to the south, the encharmed picture of the lake below to the west and the snowy hump of Mt. Baker beyond, and to the east the rilled and ridged monstrosities humping to the Cascade Ridge, and after that first time suddenly realizing “It’s me that’s changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void” and so that every time I thought of the void I’d be looking at Mt. Hozomeen (because chair and bed and meadowgrass faced north) until I realized “Hozomeen is the Void—at least Hozomeen means the void to my eyes”—Stark naked rock, pinnacles and thousand feet high protruding from hunch-muscles another thousand feet high protruding from immense timbered shoulders, and the green pointy-fir snake of my own (Starvation) ridge wriggling to it, to its awful vaulty blue smokebody rock, and the “clouds of hope” lazing in Canada beyond with their tittlefaces and parallel lumps and sneers and grins and lamby blanks and puffs of snout and mews of crack saying “Hoi! hoil earth!”—the very top tittermost peak abominables of Hozomeen made of black rock and only when storms blow I dont see them and all they do is return tooth for tooth to storm an imperturbable surl for cloudburst mist—Hozomeen that does not crack like cabin rigging in the winds, that when seen from upsidedown (when I’d do my headstand in the yard) is just a hanging bubble in the illimitable ocean of space—

Yes, for I’d thought, in June, hitch hiking up there to the Skagit Valley in northwest Washington for my fire lookout job “When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and everybody leaves on mules and I’m alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering and going to and fro in vain” but instead I’d come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me and many’s the time I thought I die, suspire of boredom, or jump off the mountain, but the days, nay the hours dragged and I had no guts for such a leap, I had to wait and get to see the face of reality—and it finally comes that afternoon of August 8 as I’m pacing in the high alpine yard on the little wellworn path I’d beaten, in dust and rain, on many a night, with my oil lamp banked low inside the cabin with the four-way windows and peaked pagoda roof and lightning rod point, it finally comes to me, after even tears, and gnashing, and the killing of a mouse and attempted murder of another, something I’d never done in my life (killing animals even rodents), it comes in these words: “The void is not disturbed by any kind of ups or downs, my God look at Hozomeen, is he worried or tearful? Does he bend before storms or snarl when the sun shines or sigh in the late day drowse? Does he smile? Was he not born out of madbrained turmoils and upheavals of raining fire and now’s Hozomeen and nothing else? Why should I choose to be bitter or sweet, he does neither?—Why cant I be like Hozomeen and O Platitude O hoary old platitude of the bourgeois mind “take life as it comes”—Twas that alcoholic biographer, W. E. Woodward, said, “There’s nothing to life but just the living of it”—But O God I’m bored! But is Hozomeen bored? And I’m sick of words and explanations. Is Hozomeen?

Aw, and I remember sweet days of home that I didn’t appreciate when I had them—afternoons then, when I was 15, 16, it meant Ritz Brothers crackers and peanut butter and milk, at the old round kitchen table, and my chess problems or self-invented baseball games, as the orange sun of Lowell October’d slant thru the porch and kitchen curtains and make a lazy dusty shaft and in it my cat’d be licking his forepaw laplap with tiger tongue and cue tooth, all undergone and dust betided, Lord—so now in my dirty torn clothes I’m a bum in the High Cascades and all I’ve got for a kitchen is this crazy battered stove with cracked stovepipe rust—stuffed, yea, at the ceiling, with old burlap, to keep the rats of night out—days long ago when I could have simply walked up and kissed either my mother or my father and say “I like you because someday I’ll be an old bum in desolation and I’ll be alone and sad”—O Hozomeen, the rocks of it gleam in the downgo sun, the inaccessible fortress parapets stand like Shakespeare in the world and for miles around not a thing knows the name of Shakespeare, Hozomeen or me—

Meanwhile the sunsets are mad orange fools raging in the gloom, whilst far in the south in the direction of my intended loving arms of señoritas, snowpink piles wait at the foot of the world, in general silver ray cities—the lake is a hard pan, gray, blue, waiting at the mist bottoms for when I ride her in Phil’s boat—Jack Mountain as always receives his meed of little cloud at highbrow base, his thousand football fields of snow all raveled and pink, that one unimaginable abominable snowman still squatted petrified on the ridge—Golden Horn far off is yet golden in a gray southeast—Sourdough’s monster hump overlooks the lake—Surly clouds blacken to make fire rims at that forge where the night’s being hammered, crazed mountains march to the sunset like drunken cavaliers in Messina when Ursula was fair, I would swear that Hozomeen would move if we could induce him but he spends the night with me and soon when stars rain down the snowfields he’ll be in the pink of pride all black and yaw-y to the north where (just above him every night) North Star flashes pastel orange, pastel green, iron orange, iron blue, azurite indicative constellative auguries of her makeup up there that you could weigh on the scales of the golden world—

Only the night before my decision to live loving, I had been degraded, insulted, and made mournful by this dream:

I could go mad in this—O carryall menaya but the weel may track the rattle-burr, poniac the avoid devoidity runabout, minavoid the crail—Song of my all the vouring me the part de rail-ing carry all the pone—part you too may green and fly—welkin moon wrung salt upon the tides of come-on night, swing on the meadow shoulder, roll the boulder of Buddha over the pink partitioned west Pacific fog mow—O tiny tiny tiny human hope, O molded cracking thee mirror thee shook pa t n a watalaka—and more to go—

Every night at 8 the lookouts on all the different mountaintops in the Mount Baker National Forest have a bull session over their radios—I have my own Packmaster set and turn it on, and listen.