Though the appointment book breaks off, and the journal has yet to take up the tale, I did turn in my materials, play my final juries and graduate. My studies with Hugo Norden came to a respectful end. Smith had been to the Eventworks Concert and his praise for the "Homefires Fantasy" was faint, but, coming from him, most welcome. He wanted to know why I didn't play it myself.
"It's a bit over my head, Mr. Smith."
"Yes, I s'pose it is."
He said this with a big grin on his face. I was touched that he'd shown up. He was out of his element in that auditorium full of crazies. I think he left after the Gharabekian.
As for the piano Jury, after it was over, I walked out into the street in the Spring of my final year, and, as had become a tradition after the nerve-wrack of the juries, I walked the perimeter of the town at a brisk clip. By the time I'd get back to my crib, the sun would be setting, I'd be sweating, and my head would be clear. The ZaZen.
I must have just squeaked by. I never had to do anything dramatic with the knowledge that the Dean was fucking Anderson Lee. Perhaps that wouldn't have worked anyway. But both of those men bent over backwards (well...not quite that far!) to see me off into the world with a diploma.
I remember, in the last week, taking that elevator ride with Gianini.
"Hi, Cal! It's Cal, right?"
"Yep. Yes, sir. Cal Hunter."
"So...Cal...have you given some thought to your plans after graduation?"
"Yes. I was thinking of maybe hiking the Appalachian Trail."
"My. That sounds adventurous. But I meant your work plans."
"You mean do I have a gig lined up?"
"Well, I thought you might consider a career. In Insurance."
We arrived at our floor. Over the many intervening years, I still find this insulting.
On graduation day, I had my mortarboard and my parents. In the photos, I look absolutely disheveled and dazed. My one solid plan was about to disintegrate.
Justin played the organ at the diploma-granting ceremony. He played some of the usual stuff, but as a recessional, in front of all of those parents and the rest of us, he smooshed out some clusters and uncorked a sick number from Albright's "Organ Book II."
Van Dyke and I had babbled about hiking the Appalachian Trail when school got out. The "AT" as it is known, stretches 2181 miles from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia. To hike it all at once is called 'thru-hiking the trail.' Otherwise you're doing a sectional, or casual hike. I'd done my share of its woodland ways both as a weekender and as a sectional. Dan and I babbled about doing the whole thing in a thru-hike. The iChing had given us its apparent imprimatur. The usual way is start at Springer Mountain in Georgia in mid-May and end up on top of Mount Katahdin in Maine as far down the river of time as it takes you to do it. There are logistics. Food and supplies must be arranged for and packed. At 2181 miles, it takes time. The amount of time depends on your speed and what nature and fate dish out along the way. Records are continually being set, but we weren't thinking about records. The average thru-hike takes 5-7 months. We had between Mid-May and whenever, but I suspect we were aiming at a three to four month sprint. We were young and our ZaZen was at its zenith. (Even so, only 15-29 percent of the hikers that register in Georgia as thru-hikers report completion. This number has oscillated over the years.) Part of the babble was about the South to North or North to South option. We were closer to Katahdin than Springer. We could have planned to start in the summer heat of early June and hike south into the warm southern autumn. I had no other fixed plans. I was easy. Justin had the better packer gear. My stuff was ramshackle and still back in DC.. We babbled about mailing ourselves boots. It seems dubious to me, given the information now available on the Wiki that we could have pulled it off. Not in the casual way Van Dyke liked to plan.
It was a moot point. Van Dyke got a gig in some hot shit band in need of a replacement on the keys. A gig is a gig, so off he went on tour.
I decided, as a reward for all of that pointless babbling, to do a section as a solo. I can hear Justin now, as I recall it:
"I can't go."
"...(crestfallen look)..."
"But that's not to stop you. Just do it solo."
It was going to be a larger section than I'd ever attempted before. Van Dyke lent me his gear as a sort of consolation prize, having deprived me of his company and the prospect of a two thousand mile babble. This would not have been your stroll around the Fenway, folks. This would have been like a scene in Deliverance (Jame's Dickey's novel about machismo and foolishness), and about who was Burt Reynolds and who was Jon Voight. Thanks to the New Lost City Rambers for the deprivation; given what we've seen of Van Dyke and his effect on my judgement, that might have been, well, hopeless. Maybe. Who knows?
The solo hike.
And with this, I commenced my Journal. A brown cardboard covered 80 sheet spiral notebook that began with a packing list for a backpacking trip. The journal was Stevie's idea.
"You should keep a journal. You don't think your life is interesting?"
A curious way to put it. A backpacker thinks of keeping the weight down. But I'm glad I took that journal. And kept it. For 40 years.
[The journals no longer exist, or have not come to light. Given the Great Collapse, and the shuffling of much paper and loss of "data" - the "bits and bytes" meaning of this term is apocryphal, all vanished like the wind - these things are likely lost forever. But we -they- have these wikis and blog transcriptions. We -they- know that Hunter took his childish scriblings and thought well enough of them to lift them out, facelift them up, and blog them in his fictional memoir. But 40 years! That's a lot we have left to learn of. Even for the third person and the omniscient narrator, that's a lot that we can't know or see.]
I've tired of transcribing lists.
I packed my pack and hiked around town with it on to test the fit. I tweaked it. It weighed about 44 pounds. It included Justin's two man tent. I stopped by the garage with it on. The others wanted to try it out.
"That thing is heavy!"
I felt the ego being stoked. I was going to put that thing on and head out into the wilderness of Massachusetts.
I decided, since Justin wasn't going and I was going to attempt an actual solo trip of some duration, breaking all my prior records, I'd better scale my planning down to something I could really do without dying trying. I'd skip heading up to Katahdin or down to Springer. Instead, I'd take a bus directly west to the Berkshires and start walking in the direction of New York, ie., south. I'd traverse Connecticut alongside the Housatonic River. (I'd be walking beside the scene of that great score of Ives in my boots, stocking up on alpha waves.) I'd graze the western edge of New Hampshire (pron., 'new hampsha'). I'd end up just Northwest of Manhattan in Harrison State Park, on Bear Mountain. I'd take the train in to New York City, hang out with the Nestlings, then beat it back to Boston on the train. Furthermore, the Cal Hunter planning committee (of one) decided that I wouldn't be a purist, a 'white blazer.' Some hikers of the AT make a point of not getting off the trail. The trail is marked by white blazes painted on trees and the like, anything suitably phallic or visible. In rocky areas, the blazes are underfoot on rock. It's the swampy areas where the blazes cannot be made permanent or visible; it's in these areas where one can go astray. You need to take a compass. (These days a GPS and some batteries.) Blue blazes mark the side trails, which head off to lean-tos - the three sided shelters provided and maintained by the clubs and marked on the maps, campsites (though any clearing can serve for back country camping), and roads which lead to towns. The purist, or those trying to make good time, will avoid these or use them only to avail themselves of the shelters.
The shelters, by the way, have their own logs invariably, in which hikers leave their marks, record their pithy observations, piss and moan, tell their tales of woe and joy.
[Cal did all of this, certainly, besides keeping his private journal. These logs are not all lost. The authorities did not chase the citizens into the hills, and the citizens did take to the hills. There was warring on the old trails, of course, but the practice of communal journaling never vanished. At first the citizens had their little electronic devices that connected them to their networks. They noted in the lean-to logs, which began to accumulate appendices, the onslaught of the Great Collapse. Over time, those inclined to journal took to preserving these collections. This is how we - they - Eve and Number Three - know what they came to know.]
It was my intention to avail myself of the blue blaze trails to re-supply in towns. My maps told me where the towns were nearest the trail heads.
The day came, June 14, 1977, when I boarded the bus for the Berkshires, with pack. It was a one way ticket, yeah. (Beatles song.) I had some time to kill at the bus station in Springfield, so I journaled. I described how it came to pass that I'd ditched the Cal Crib and moved in with Laird and Lucy. I only describe the effort to bring the place up to my own personal code, which is funny because I didn't think I had one a few chapters back. I don't describe the reason I moved out. Perhaps it was because Lucy went with Laird on the road, and somebody needed to hold down the fort in Boston. So I went on a housekeeping bender. Having done that, I headed for the bus. Presumably someone looked after the shadowy figures hinted at in the background: the long suffering cat population. Azu?
From this, I wing right in to another sex scene. I tell the tale of our sexcapade and love duet, hinting at the sequence of events prior to the final, last call of nature as the curtain fell. I had that habit of trotting up those stairs to the lair of the dykes for a bowl or two (or three) and chess. Zandra wasn't always around. She had the rhythm of her day/night job at Westland Foods and sometimes travelled. This left the henhouse unguarded, and me and Azu alone. We'd play a game of chess, talk of books, play records. We spoke distractedly of siblings and our past. On one such night, with Zandra gone, Azu spoke of being bored with the dominatrix. Slow on the up take, I stared into her big brown eyes. She took my hand and held it. I wondered what was on her mind.
"I propose we have an affair. I'm...I need an antidote for boredom."
"An affair as a pick me up?"
She smiled. Her response was to move her hand from mine to the mop on my head. She got down on the floor before the chair I sat in, and I let my fingers explore her wild mane. At length she got back up. She knelt beside me, and kissed me. I kissed back. I fought back my tide of guilt. I wished I had a condom. I didn't want to be a father. When the record ended, she stood up. She took my hand and led me to the bedroom. Following, following, always following. She undressed quickly. I followed suit, disrobing. We kissed again. Not a word did she say about birth control. I lowered myself into bed beside her, following, following. She again took the initiative; I became aware that I was following and felt ashamed, a little, of my timidity. It read in my head as a certain detachment; isolation. Love the one you're with. I would have loved to take great pains and time to arouse her, know that she wanted me very much, and finger fuck her to climax. I vowed to do this next time, if there was a next time. The woman had other plans. She felt my cock for a moment, as if to assess the state of the affair. She had seen me undress; she knew that I was ready. Now she knew I was really ready, and she moved me over and lay atop me, anointing me with her oils. I was under her freaking out. Is she at all worried about pregnancy? She must know her clock well. Soon, she moved up slightly and took the bull by the horns. She guided and I glided. At this she gasped. She began to move in rhythm. I followed for awhile then slowed. She slowed along with me. As I lay still, waiting to make love stay as long as it might stay, she climbed off and turned away. She was soon asleep.
I soon retreated, as I relate in the Springfield bus station, confessing to my journal, and also to posterity (if there is one for me), to the parlor where we had sat. I took my clothes in tow. I dressed, save for a single sock... into which I poured the excess of my emotion.
I joined her in bed in the morning, but she very soon got up and dressed. I pondered the meaning of all of this, but could only come up with 'what the fuck?'
I eventually arrived at the place on the highway where the blue blaze crossed the road. I clambered off the bus in the late summer afternoon, and walked back to the spot. I found the blaze and the trail head and entered the woods. So green, so dark, so full of whispered promise! But I had work to do, and 'miles to go before I sleep.' It was a late start and I needed to find a place to camp before darkness fell. The first order of business was a climb.
Later, writing by flashlight in Justin's two man tent, I bitched about wanting to ditch the tent. Now that it was all set up and my sweat had dried, I was glad of its weight.
But hours earlier in life, as I scrambled up the hill and away from civilization, I found myself pouring sweat. I was soon soaked and panting. All that Za Zen! How could I be so out of shape? (I hadn't been doing step aerobics.) I began singing work songs at the top of my lungs as an energy mantra (drill, ye tarriers, drill), but then I found the white blaze, the AT proper, and entered into another steep, rocky climb. I decided to jettison my official flight plan and just get to the top of the hill and look for a place to camp. I was carrying the full weight, and some of that was water in a canteen. I would use these potables up, and eat my trail mix. But the damned tent, which weighed a lot, was not getting any lighter.
I found my clearing. Exhausted and hungry I set up the tent. Cooked some freeze- dried soup. I smoked a bowl, and broke out the flute. (Yes, I took a wooden flute. Very Thoreauvian.) The pipe worked well enough as an insect repellent while lit, but once I traded it for the flute, my abend-musik (evening music) was interrupted by a pack of blood-thirsty, music hating mosquitoes. I conclude, as I write by flashlight in the tent, away from the buzzing crowd that bite, despite the fact that battery power is a limited resource in need of conservation, that I need to get the hang of the little camp stove. (Van Dyke's Optimus 8.) "Fuckin' shit!" is not the ideal incantation to use for heating up a cup of water. It did work, though. I got it lit on the third try.
"Good night, sweet woods. I'll see you tomorrow, early."
I soon retreated, as I relate in the Springfield bus station, confessing to my journal, and also to posterity (if there is one for me), to the parlor where we had sat. I took my clothes in tow. I dressed, save for a single sock... into which I poured the excess of my emotion.
I joined her in bed in the morning, but she very soon got up and dressed. I pondered the meaning of all of this, but could only come up with 'what the fuck?'
I eventually arrived at the place on the highway where the blue blaze crossed the road. I clambered off the bus in the late summer afternoon, and walked back to the spot. I found the blaze and the trail head and entered the woods. So green, so dark, so full of whispered promise! But I had work to do, and 'miles to go before I sleep.' It was a late start and I needed to find a place to camp before darkness fell. The first order of business was a climb.
Later, writing by flashlight in Justin's two man tent, I bitched about wanting to ditch the tent. Now that it was all set up and my sweat had dried, I was glad of its weight.
But hours earlier in life, as I scrambled up the hill and away from civilization, I found myself pouring sweat. I was soon soaked and panting. All that Za Zen! How could I be so out of shape? (I hadn't been doing step aerobics.) I began singing work songs at the top of my lungs as an energy mantra (drill, ye tarriers, drill), but then I found the white blaze, the AT proper, and entered into another steep, rocky climb. I decided to jettison my official flight plan and just get to the top of the hill and look for a place to camp. I was carrying the full weight, and some of that was water in a canteen. I would use these potables up, and eat my trail mix. But the damned tent, which weighed a lot, was not getting any lighter.
I found my clearing. Exhausted and hungry I set up the tent. Cooked some freeze- dried soup. I smoked a bowl, and broke out the flute. (Yes, I took a wooden flute. Very Thoreauvian.) The pipe worked well enough as an insect repellent while lit, but once I traded it for the flute, my abend-musik (evening music) was interrupted by a pack of blood-thirsty, music hating mosquitoes. I conclude, as I write by flashlight in the tent, away from the buzzing crowd that bite, despite the fact that battery power is a limited resource in need of conservation, that I need to get the hang of the little camp stove. (Van Dyke's Optimus 8.) "Fuckin' shit!" is not the ideal incantation to use for heating up a cup of water. It did work, though. I got it lit on the third try.
"Good night, sweet woods. I'll see you tomorrow, early."
