Romance and Reality

The Mythology of Outlaws & the Search for Bill Miner
Or How I Spent My Summer Vacation and Quit My Job

Do you believe the dead can enter and alter the lives of the living? That’s what ghosts are about; that’s all they really do. They perpetuate themselves through the lives they lived right into yours and alter it. They live a myth just as you do. The life they lived was a tale, a story; and that’s enough to do the trick. All that’s required is for their myth to enter yours. That’s how the real Immaculate Conception takes place. The power of Jesus was in his story. So it was with Bill Miner, an outlaw, known to the world as the Grey Fox. Contrary to popular belief, myth is not a lie. It is lies’ deepest opposite. Mythology is truth. Find out what you are in your heart and head. That is your metaphor your story. There only remains a difference of degree. I was an outlaw in metaphor. Bill Miner was an outlaw in real life. He robbed real trains of real money. We both share the same myth. He just took the metaphor more seriously.

Bill Miner is dead. He was born in Kentucky in 1859. He lived most of his adult life in and around the small towns of Princeton, Tualameen, and Coalmont, in the sparsely populated, softly beautiful southern interior of British Columbia. It was there that he gracefully presented himself as George Edwards, a southern gentleman in search of “peace of mind.” It was there also, at about the age of sixty, that he began to gently rob trains, following the dictates of his personality, economic circumstances, and aptitude. His quixotic and cordial manner gained him a quick following of popular support and earned him the title of “Gentleman Bandit.” To those who knew him as George Edwards, he was equally admired and respected.

I’m alive. I was born in 1943 in Portland Oregon, a large provincial town of about four hundred thousand, located eighty miles inland from the northern portion of the Oregon coast, and have lived my adult life there, most of which was spent in rather bland compliance on the safe side of the law with the exception of a few minor detours mothered by the necessity of adolescent peer pressure. It wasn’t until the plot of my life began to thicken that the ghosts of Bill Miner began to haunt me.

Whether you have a parachute or not, sometimes you just have to jump. I just couldn’t stand it any more! For five years I had been seriously flirting with the terror of leaving the hospital and my career, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The sustained rage of the last few months had left my mind and stomach raw and bleeding. I was taking tranquilizers to go to work. I saw a therapist. With deft insight he told me I was in a reactive state and personalizing too much. I saw another who told me I was suffering from a sense of humiliation and powerlessness (he cost more than the first one). Driving to the hospital each morning I felt like I was in my own funeral procession.

Yet what choice did I have? I was forty five looking at fifty with a savings account that translated into twelve weeks survival and looking for another livelihood at middle age, with no other negotiable skills but the ones that were killing me, is not an American recipe for reassurance. I knew what had happened to people who had lost their entrepreneurial ‘service smile and skills kit’ in this country and it terrified me.

Part of what encouraged closer to the edge was the realization that, approaching middle age with no retirement or saving, my situation was irresistibly romantic and I could over come the charm of romance only with superhuman resistance, which I was emotionally depleted of. But spring was here. That, and my tax return, together with my savings would last me about four months-more than enough time to explore the careless rumors of a friendly universe. But that wasn’t enough. I was confused and unsure; I’d always had one foot in the ‘real’ world and one foot out and had never been able to decide which was the real trouble maker. As strongly as I disapproved of them, the city fathers were embedded in my psyche. “This profession is a tightly knit community and word of your poor attitude and peculiar behavior is getting around town. Remember your references will follow you.” But that voice was being increasingly opposed by an equally insistent one: “Life is in the living” and “a coward dies a thousand times.”

Nevertheless, I couldn’t find the courage to walk away from a life that had turned dangerously bad. I awoke feeling trapped and depressed. There was no way out. The thought of going back to the hospital was unbearable, yet the thought of leaving seemed impossible. The despair stayed inside me all morning and grew. Finally, seeking diversion I found myself outside digging a hole for a fence post. And then it happened. All of a sudden I seemed to strike something deeper than my fear. I saw instantly a sharply resurrected memory from a film I had seen about Bill Miner.

It was the wood ruins of the outlaw’s turn of the century cabin, set back in a small clearing of tall pines. It lay hidden among rolling hills about ten miles outside the small community of Princeton, in northern Canada. A current of release and escape shot through me as sharp and urgent as my instinct to survive. My life had to matter. I laid down the hole digger, went inside the house and called the hospital. “I’m gong to quit. I’ll write you up something on Monday.” “Okay,” was the response ( no love lost), “but you have to give two seeks notice.” “Start it now” I said. I went back to the fencepost in a state of shock and began to dig deeper, looking for further instructions. There were none. I was really free!

Every decision and act is in some degree a mistake that is made with insufficient date. My decision to quit my job was a mistake it would have been a mistake not to make.

I had begun to feel a growing disenchantment with the institutional medical environment in general which had deteriorated fro m a cooperative attitude concerning the subject of patient care twenty five years earlier, into a competitive, territorial, and economic atmosphere. The term ‘Patient Care’ had become mere rhetoric masking the deeper, louder voice, “How are they going to pay?” and “Do they have insurance?

It began to seem to me that physicians, the professional high priests, were becoming increasingly primitive about their altar ceremony. Money, territory and power had gradually become a primary pursuit skillfully hidden beneath the respectable veneer of healing. It was the real theme in this thick, glamorous plot; the direction at the center, backstage. Only here, the patient was part of the production without knowing it. The physicians did everything but lift their legs to urinate on the patient’s door to mark their territory, and I was as bad as the rest of them.

My treasonous observation s gradually gave way to a daily release of freelance cynical commentary, like Hawkeye in a stateside M.A.S.H. unit. Only I soon discovered I was without his immunity. This was real life, not a movie set. They took their roles seriously. My evaluations and the random reactions I received were not unlike those you would receive from your neighbors if you were to display a Soviet flag from your front porch on the 4th of July. My heresy was in not believing in most of what I was doing and much of what they were doing. My attentions shifted more and more back to a recurring voice that said, “Heal thyself.” But how? I was beginning to realize that most of my adult life I’d felt like a galley slave in leg irons.

I cannot recall now what impulse first pulled me into that dark neighborhood theater to see a low profile release called ‘The Grey Fox’ about an elderly outlaw who robbed trains, nor did I fully realize when I left that I’d had an experience of the imagination that would change the story of my life. All I remember is a feeling of becoming slowly enchanted, as though someone were casting a spell over me. There up on the screen sporting a gray old west mustache and a softly rugged countenance was a geriatric Gary Cooper exuding a relaxed warmth and eyes sparkling with a secret glee reserved for those who have discovered where they’re supposed to be in the universe. He took his sister Jenny into his arms and said with quiet dignity, “I’m just no good at work planned out by other men.” I watched him pursue a silver screen romance, tailored to his own design. I saw the graceful courtesy with which he robbed trains; the orange gently handed to the little boy at the train station like loving advice from a father, the cautious but genuine respect he bestowed on all other lives. He took money from those who had it, but like a Zen master, only when it was clearly the right thing to do.

A dimly understood sense of excitement and joy took root inside me and began to grow. I went back to that dark theater five times, and each time he was there, riding a coal black mare up into solitary rolling hills and free wind amid aspen, hemlock and white birch exploding into fall golds and reds, quietly courting his own strength, seeking his own counsel. I recalled the testimony Christians gave of having been born again. It was true, salvation was possible. I had been shown the wary. Only, instead of Jesus, my savior was an elderly train robber named Bill Miner.

It was on a Friday that I entered the hospital for the last time. I walked past the preposterous marble statue of a cross-shaped stethoscope at the entrance and hastily advanced through the fiercely guarded economic territories of Radiology and Emergency and headed toward my department. I wasn’t fast enough. “They need you in bay 5, Dr. Tower wants some blood gases, a 12 lead EKG and a ventilator. Dr. Tower’s interpretive skills with blood gases and a EKG usually produced results akin to involuntary manslaughter. He had graduated Harvard (Class of 1809) and was still bravely trying to get the knack of it, usually settling out of court.

A wave of cynical anger engulfed me. Somehow I made it safely through the day. I realized I was starting to lose my balance. I felt the need to exile; to vacate from everything I’d ever known, loved, or hated.

My camper was loaded: clothes, books, beer, maps, popcorn, and several varieties of lethally preserved chips. I waited and grew anxious. A sense of panic began to build inside me. Something would go wrong. I’d never get out of the building. They’d catch me at the last minute. But they didn’t. Then it was my camper that fueled my fear- a flat tire, something invisible in that mysterious steel block called an engine wouldn’t work, the windshield would pop out, the wheel would fall off. My mind continued to race, No, I thought, not the car, the tire, the wheel. My heart! Some little margarine plaque in the ascending coronary artery would dislodge, float upstream and quietly dam up a crucial bend in the river. The marvelous little beating red center would suddenly cease. The tent would collapse, the circus would be over.

But no as Mark Twain observed, “I had many problems, but most of them never happened.” The clock struck three. I took off my sacred white coat, walked through the door and left the building. My camper started, the tire and wheel held, and my heart beat flawlessly. I turned the key and pressed the pedal. The big machine moved out into the cement inner city. I worked my way into the asphalt vessels and found the major artery leading out and into the asphalt vessels and found the major artery leading out and into the clear, free Columbian river gorge.

I was still tense. Even after ten minutes and ten miles I sensed they could still get me. Twenty miles and I began to feel my stomach and chest loosen and relax. It was a little after an hour that I felt the first surge of escape shoot through me. I had done it! I had escaped the gravitational pull of my old orbit. I rolled down my window. A rush of delirious laughter shook my body and burst up out of my chest. I stuck my head out the window into the wind. A sharp, irrational joy surged through me. I had left Rome and no longer had to do what the Romans did. God damn them! God damn them all.

It was early September and I still had several hours of daylight left. I used it all to increase my distance and continued east. The lavish thick green of the northwest slowly transformed into a desert cradling the great Columbia river on either side beneath bare Egyptian hills pasteled in gold, white, and brown lavender that lay high up and softly away from me. Monolith cloud shadows rolled gently over them as though searching for a lost home. The earth beyond seemed distant, unreal, and irresistible. Like Matisse when he discovered paint, I felt ‘transported to a paradise, free, quiet and alone.” The last thinning layer of pine trees dotted the hills like dying echoes.

Checking my map, I followed green signs with white numbers as if they were leading me to lost treasure. Highway 730 at Boardman will lead you to Umatilla, Yakima, Walla Walla and Waitsburg. I pulled into, found a quiet street just off the main one and stopped. I opened the door and put my feet on the ‘sea of tranquility sidewalk and began taking giant steps. I walked for an hour, intoxicated with a calm elation in a new world. I had landed right in the center of Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe’s America and they were right, there’s enough sad beauty to tear your Hindu heart out. I walked through a landscape of empty corner lots, back alleys, and streets all gracefully lined with crippled tall oak and elm trees that fronted rows of softly decaying rural houses. There were grocery stores with wood floors, rusty welding shops, dilapidated diners, backyard clotheslines with all the clothes fit to print on them, worn pool halls and lonely city parks. There were taverns and forgotten bus stops and two story corner brownstone apartments with old ladies cats lived and an Elks Lodge with lingering veterans of foreign wars just waiting.

I went back to my camper, got in, and drove on. There were small towns with large Indian populations driving big old Buicks down long empty roads, no where to go, wearing Levis and shopping at Safeway, nothing to do, making the best a bad long situation. I had the hospital and they had America. I had been luckier, I could leave

I stopped at the Whitman Massacre site, where a century before a group of self respecting Indians, ungrateful over their introduction to measles and the white man’s God promptly sent them back to him. They knew a Safeway at Yakima was around the corner. I continued driving. The road stretched out straight and flat through acres of green hushed farmland. The sun was falling behind me in a clear twilight. Ahead, thick brooding storm clouds collided in a gold gray sky. I passed a field of motionless horses quietly eating purple clover in an eerie silver light.

A little after seven I saw a sign ahead on the right hand side of the road. It said ‘Welcome to Idaho.” I pulled my camper off the road. I got out and walked back and put my lips in the middle of the ‘O’ and kissed it, then continued on, determined to make Lewiston by dark. I began to feel slightly anxious and uneasy, like a truant, furtive schoolboy. Probably what Bill Miner felt after leaving a train with a bag of money.

By nightfall I had settled into a small quiet RV park just outside the city limits of Lewiston. The night was dark, a deep clear enveloping black. I poured a glass of herbal tea and one of beer and drank them and slept the sleep of the joyous.

I awoke to the large dusty American town of Lewiston set at the bottom of gigantic bare hills. I had a wonderful breakfast of cold lemon water and cheez-its, and then started my camper and headed up over the huge sentinel hills. I climbed steadily up a sharp ascent for twenty minutes to a plateau of level land and passage north. I glanced back down the flat dullness of Lewiston its barren lunar valley and then out the window ahead of me at cows and horses chewing on taller, greener grass. And trees, one-two-three-four-five evergreens, and small rolling sharply contoured hills in a gold brown green quilt of earth colors. North was happening right in front of me.

Ten miles outside of Moscow, Idaho a black State Police car pulled out of a dirt road and followed me like an idle Darth Vader crow monitoring aliens. My chest tightened till he turned off. Then I relaxed and continued on to Moscow, a small quiet grassy knolled town with rolling lawns and tired elm trees. I made a random turn and found myself on the campus of the University of Idaho. It was a bright crisp fall Sunday and I drove slowly among ivy-covered brick buildings holding their safe knowledge, cloistered away form the real world. Several young students emerged from out of a two story grey house labeled ‘Sigma Alpha Epsilon’ and walked aimlessly across a large manicured lawn clutching books on Plato, Western Civ, and advanced economics, unaware of what it could all lead to, even if they were careful.

The route out of town led me past St. Mary’s Catholic Church which was busy preparing for eleven o’clock mass. I pulled over to marvel. A steady procession of people dutifully moved up the sidewalk and climbed the solemn stone gray steps. A tall priest in a green and gold robe gathered them in at the door as though insuring against any last minute change of heart. I saw two men, still fresh from riding the rails in their late 50’s or 6o’s. Their clothes were makeshift and dirty and they were in line, a secure ritual in itself for them. I saw the priest take note that they were not of his flock, but dutifully accept them. Out in front, at the right of the steps, sat a six foot high marble tomb stone with the Ten commandments chiseled on it. As I was pulling out to leave, I happened to glance at a vacant lot adjoining the church. There, in a sunlit silhouette, two eight or nine year old girls were safely truant, playing in a deeper grace. My faith; restored, I drove away.

I coasted into Coeur d’Alene two hours later. It was a large city like Portland, too large. I felt the crush of law, Medicine, Education, conventions, sermons and city ordinances. I didn’t even stop. Bill Miner would have understood. He didn’t want to break laws, just abandon them; workplace work ethics, local laws, city laws, state laws, federal laws. The equally taxing laws of in-laws; the laws of culture, tradition, ethics, and religion. I hurried on until I was safely back in the company of horses, cows, coyotes, trees and hills.

I hit Libby, Montana at five o’clock. It seemed that the nightmare of my life in Portland was light years away. I awoke the next morning to a dead battery and enjoyed it. Feeling the need for symbolic resurrection I bought a new one at Jake’s Auto Parts. My horse was re-shod. I was on my way again heading north on highway 37. The sign said 48 miles to the Canadian border. It was blue skies and mountains all the way. I passed through Rexford, the last smallest town in America and crossed into Canada smiling.

I spent the night at a near deserted campground a mile off the road near Fermie, British Columbia. I built a campfire near the bend of a small friendly river and sat under quiet contented stars. I was dizzy with a scenic sensory overload; a good tired rested inside me.
The small towns sprinkled like utopian confetti passed through my mind: Klickitat, Kennewick, Pasco, Walla Walla, Prescott, Pomeroy, Waitsburg, Yakima, Troy, Sandpoint, Bonners Ferry, Eureka, Crowsnest, Creston, and Cranbrook. The bicycled children in side streets and parks and back yards with ever patient dogs tethered by invisible cords. And the people in stores, gas stations, taverns, churches, and Laundromats hugging to their home base. I thought of Thomas Wolfe, “The pity, terror, strangeness and magnificence of it all. “

I awoke Tuesday to a Canadian late fall morning with sun just hitting the mountains high above the river. I jumped out of my bag, dropped my shorts, ran out barefoot naked, peed, shivered and breathed in the sharp edged air. I ran back and leaped into my bag and watched the morning thaw through my window.

Looking over my map I saw the town of Kamloops where ‘The Grey Fox’ had been filmed. I ate, cleaned, and departed with a sense of charged purpose. I arrived in Kamloops near dusk. Coming down out of the mountains in a long steep decent I gazed upon the flat sprawl of a Mexican looking border town of rural poor. At the first gas station I got directions to a campground located on an Indian reservation just on the edge of town. I was beginning to feel an odd mixture of disorientation and uneasy excitement. Driving through downtown Kamloops, I saw a middle aged Chinese man come our a back alley looking lost and misplaced. A sudden fear fell on me as if I had just broken loose from a lifelong mooring I’d never noticed. A subtle terror swept through me in a wave. All the people in all the small towns I’d passed through now seemed like nomads, wandering refugees of life’s general disorder and confusion. It suddenly seemed as though the most unadventurous bank clerk, locked in his teller’s cage, was rooted in pure dice like random chance; we were all firmly securely adrift. I finally found the campground and settled down in the strange darkness to an anxious sleep.

I awoke in a clear morning light. Last night’s demons had vanished back to their deeper origins. I looked around and saw a nearly empty park that lay on a short rise above a wide river that ran past the whole town. There was only one other camper about a hundred and fifty feet away. We both rested in three roped off small wide open fields which hosted several clumps of hundred foot high maple trees that towered up and made a canopy over us. Patches of bark were worn off the trees, and there were large areas of old yellow grass that had been brushed flat by the passage of tires. A few stone circular pits with the charcoaled remains of past fires were scattered unevenly like ancient sores on a tired earth. Its look hinted at poverty but the feeling was clean and good and unpretentious. There wasn’t a trace of despair in the whole campground.

I ate a bowl of shredded wheat, raisins, and bananas and headed down the embankment toward the river. I sat on a small sandy beach and felt the morning sun rise and warm the cool air. Several canoes passed soundlessly nearby. High overhead a parade of geese followed, making distant announcements. A calm elation came over me, a moment of being utterly satisfied. I wanted to stay right there with the sun and the sand and the river forever. I knew it didn’t get any better. I sat there for an hour with my hands and feet buried in the warm sand.

I walked up to the office and found the proprietor, a short heavy lady in her early fifties sitting leisurely in a rocker, looking comfortably used and friendly, like a read and discarded Sunday paper. I asked about Bill Miner. “Yes, I believe they have a whole thing about him, a display or something at the downtown museum.

I found it easily. There, inside an oak case were weathered handguns and holsters and some clothing artifacts he had been caught with. I stared in astonishment. He was real!

I found the archives room where a young woman sat me down at a table with an armload of information on him. It was unbelievable! There he was in celluloid, sitting upright in the buckboard between the sheriff and two deputies bringing him back form their capture as Aspen Grove like big game hunters. He was described as kind, soft spoken and considerate, possessing a genuine fondness for children and animals. What impressed one reviewer was Miner’s gentleness despite his having spent a quarter of his life in the harsh prison system of his day. I learned that he spent most of his time around Princeton and Merrit. I got up from the table and thanked the lady and went back to my car and got out the map.

I arrived in Merrit several hours later and directed by a man at the Chamber Of Commerce to a Christian book store several blocks away. “Go talk to Pat Allen, he knows of him.” I found Pat, a heavy balding man of stern clean piety, and he wasn’t talking. “I don’t approve of adding to the legend of a man who did not contribute to society.” He was staying safely on the side lines, a devout umpire. As I was leaving he relented a bit and said Miner was known to have stayed overnight frequently at Aspen Gove, a small roadside junction between Merrit and Princeton.

It was about then that I began to separate from my ordinary sense of reality, to feel the ghost of Bill Miner begin to filter into my life and alter it. I was no longer directing the course of my day. Something was pulling me toward the life of this dead outlaw.

I headed south toward Princeton and stopped at a small diner in Aspen Grove run by an elderly couple who’d lived there for forty eight years. They said they knew Miner had a cabin somewhere nearby. They’d heard others tell of it but didn’t know where it was. They told me to look up Jerry Harker in Princeton and gave me directions to his farm.

I continued on a two hour drive to Princeton down a winding two lane country road. The autumn sun was brilliant and sharp; there wasn’t another car on the road but me. I knew that he had been here, right where I was, that his horse had moved through these hills and rolling fields and had stopped to rest among the scattered clumps of trees. I began to feel like a Christian entering Jerusalem. But there was no Calvary here. I felt his happiness, the quiet contentment of his freedom.

I found Jerry Harker standing among a small patch of corn and tomatoes with a garden how in his hand. He was a thin man of small stature with a ruddy face and a small beak nose. He dropped his how and gave me a lively handshake. As soon as I got out the name Bill Miner he let out a yelp of delight and his face lit up. “Well I’ll tell you the truth I knew his sidekick Jack Budd very well, worked with him all one winter up at the cabin but I only saw Miner once. He moved around quite a bit and that winter he was mostly gone. I learned he spent a lotta time with friends over on Chisler Hill. One of the woman whose gone now told me Miner was a real gentleman and had a special warmth for kids.

The last one who knew him was old Mrs. Thomas an she passed on five years ago but she used to tell that Miner would give dancing lessons down at Hadley where he used to go to check on gold shipments. She said he was quite a ladies man and especially loved the waltz. Story has it that old Jack Budd had a gold brick hid up near his place and people have come from all around to look for it but none have ever found it. Jack used to have a woman friend named Hilda Hatch that ran a whorehouse down in Chilliwack and she swore to the gold brick was on Jack’s place but they’ve dug up every fence post and looked down every hole but never found it. I heard the story so often I got up my nerve one day and asked him. He just gave me an odd smile and said, “Jerry, if I had a gold brick do you think I’d be living like this?” well between you an me, I think he would of and I think he had the gold brick but I can’t prove it. Some say Jack was in on the hold up as Aspen Grove where they caught Miner but I don’t believe it. If he’d have been there they would have had fresh horses and wouldn’t have gotten caught.

I stood there listening in a dazed awe. I asked him if he could tell me how to get to where the cabin was. “Well it’s up on Bald Mountain. The old place caught fire some years ago and I don’t know how much is left.” He gave me directions and I headed east up winding rocky roads and a succession of endless yellow wheat hills. I continued to climb feeling a wild exhilaration but after three miles I began to wonder I ‘d gone the wrong way. My camper had a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and I didn’t even carry a wrench with me and even if I’d wanted to turn around the road was too narrow now. My former exhilaration turned into a slowly rising sense of alarm. Then my thoughts turned on me. What was I doing in these remote Canadian hills chasing the wake of this dead train robber? Why wasn’t I back in my safe hospital with my safe white coat. An adrenaline rush forced my foot down on the gas and I moved ahead faster.

I drove another hundred yards and rounded a sharp bend when the magic struck again. There it was! The tall trees vanished into a clearing shaped like a baseball field. Stark and alone out in the center field in a prairie of yellow grass, stood the charred ruins of the old cabin. I stopped the camper, got out and stood there staring at it in a loud silence, feeling this dead outlaw’s life cascading and tumbling into mine, rearranging it like a design in a turning kaleidoscope, in the absolute romance of reality.

Only parts of the north and east wall remained. I walked toward it slowly and quietly. There were low bare hills that watched over it from behind. It was perfect. They could have seen anyone coming either from those low naked hills or approaching form the front, as I was, out of the trees. It was solitary and free, they had been completely exposed and at the same time safe and protected.

It was smaller than I’d imagined. There was only one twenty foot square room but it had a feeling of weight about it, a heavier hidden significance coming from something unrelated to its size. I remembered the first time I’d held a real gun in my hand. I was nine years old and playing at Bruce’s house next door. His parents had gone to a movie and left us alone. He took me into their bedroom and brought down a shoe box from a high shelf in their closet. We sat on their bed and he removed the lid and handed me the gun. My hand dropped several inches when he laid it in my palm. It felt serious, something belonging to larger consequences, at once more remote and more real, like the stone axe from a prehistoric cave I’d once seen in a museum. The cabin like the gun introduced me to new dimensions, to lives lived in larger actions, of an existence unlike mine. Romance and reality kept seducing me and I still couldn’t decipher their boundaries. Like wave and particle, caterpillar and butterfly, they kept changing uniform.

I lived the next several hours of my life there. I didn’t want to leave. There was something there I would need when I returned to the city and the remainder if my life. Standing next to the cabin I remembered being in the center of the huge cathedral of Westminster Abbey where I was encircled by massive stained glass windows, rows of reds and yellows and orange and green and blue pouring down to the floor in a sunlight radiance.

This was the return point in my journey. I had been given a vision of sanctuary and it was just out of reach. I was going back to routine, to another job somewhere, to the absence of joy. A futile will to resist rose up in me briefly then disappeared. I walked back to my camper and got in and turned around and drove away. The cabin shrank and disappeared in my rear view mirror and I went back down the mountain, to the past and the future, strangely nourished and newly deprived.