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| Bare Ass Beach in the time of the Osqua Indians |
The floor of the living room was stones set in broad margins
of mortar. They were almost flat to walk on. More than once Warren had stubbed
his toe on the edge of a stone.
He lit a Lucky Strike from a pack on the coffee table. It
took a long time for smoke to float to the pine vaulted ceiling. The smoke floated
up listlessly. It drifted above him to a spot patched with plywood. That was
where he shot a hole through the ceiling one night with a single shot 410.
You might want to ask him why he did that? Just how curious
are you?
You'd probably get asked what his dad asked him out in the
garage when he caught boy-Warren sneaking a pull off of his jug --
What's the matter with you, boy?! Your face ain't hurting bad
enough?!
Then Warren would flash that grin that generates a neon gleam
through his eyes and fix your face for you.
Truth was Warren couldn’t remember why he’d shot the ceiling
anymore than he could remember exactly why he hit guys in bars.
It was like some Masher Minder snipped a synapse-receptor
connection. Took wire cutters and snap! Cut it clean through! Freed it from
binding bondage! Saved it from the responsibility of storing memory. Then
shoved a hood over his memory cage.
Someone had to do it, he’d say if he was in a good mood and
not up to busting your face. Someone had to shoot it. Grin. Hands in the air,
palms up, shrugging.
I was gonna hit the ceiling anyway, he'd probably say. Was gonna
go through the roof. Might as well do it sooner than later! I was on the down
side of a four-day speed run anyway. Living on potato chips and beer. Besides
everyone else, including you, was asleep.
You want to ask him why he needed to hit the ceiling? Maybe
you think that grin is friendly.
Maybe you're not feeling the slide guitar ping in his eyes. If that Masher
Minder managed to reconnect his synapse with it's lonely receptor, slap some
Duct Tape on that sucker and yank the hood off of his memory, Warren’d be able
to tell you he was pissed at those dirty hippies invading Bare Ass Beach the
day before. That would be day 3 of his speed run.
Those dirty little assholes! He could hear them from on up
through the tall trees surrounding his cabin above the Fish Hawk River. He heard
them all the way from down there on the River on old Bare Ass Beach. Heard the
whooping and hollering.
The drumming was a steady pulse. The drums knocked in his
head. A wobbly rhythmic knocking, their stretched covered membranes reverberating
the membrane of his mind. It resonated, got into his head and under his skin,
like some primeval beat that had been ground into his psyche as the sun came up
during that first time of days when it was just discovering its warmth.
Mankind's first headache. He didn't like it then and he sure as hell didn't
like it now.
He saw himself jerking his body around his place to the
beating of the drums, dancing to the deja vu beat that resounded from the dark
woods with soul intensity and fervent continuum that mimicked hot breathing and
set the time to the Universe's pulse. He didn't need or want anybody keeping
the Universe's time for him!
That did it! He wasn't going to be a comic book character in
his own house! Time to go on down there. And if he was lucky, maybe some naked
hippie chick'd offer him a toke of rope.
So he tumbled out the door, grinning, quite confident with
the electricity of the speed firing sparks in his blood cells and surging
through his consciousness.
There are two ways to get to Bare Ass Beach. The civilized
chicken-shit way is to cross the Fish Hawk by walking across High Bridge Bridge
from Oldmill Road to Treeline Road. That's the way the hippies went (though to
cut 'em some slack, it's the way most everyone goes). Once across the bridge
they had to climb down a short steep path from Treeline Road, a stretch that's
there just to make you think you're roughing it.
The High Bridge Bridge is a covered bridge that spans the
Fish Hawk River just west of High Bridge town. The covered part looks like the
roof of a big old white barn. It was designed by the Corps of Engineers in 1936
to replace the original bridge the Osqua Indians had watched getting hammered
into being as they surrendered Fish Hawk Country to the Whites.
Years after the Osqua's stoic departure, the first bridge
mysteriously burned down. Did some Osqua upstart with a cantankerous spirit
sneak down from the caves and plateaus hidden in the mist of the mountains to
torch it? Did one of the younger Leggitts or Bardells, now counted as ancestors
by the current generation, strike a match during a drunk? What happened has
long ago been swirled away by the Fish Hawk itself.
What is known, but not talked about, is that men working for
the Works Projects Administration built the bridge. The Corps supervised.
So the Government, the Federal
Government, is responsible for the bridge. This doesn't get talked about in
High Bridge town. It doesn't get talked about down in Oldmill either. Folks
around those parts don't think too much of the Government. They see the
Government as butting into lives, telling them when and where they can hunt and
fish, when and where they can cut timber, what they can and can't drink and
smoke.
But the men who actually built High Bridge Bridge were real
people. Real poor people. WPA grunts. They were Great Depression poor. Pain-in-the-belly-at-bedtime
poor. Many had come in from Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma. Side-steppin' right
out of Woody Guthrie's "Do-Re-Me." Working the bridge put beans in
their belly and chaw down inside their lower lips.
Some of them still lived in and around High Bridge town and
down in Oldmill in this time that we're talking about. They won't talk about
working on the bridge, quarrying the heavy stone for the abutments, milling the
timber and hoisting it into place, and they sure won't talk about any of the make-out
humping and carrying on that took place under that roof since the bridge's been
built. High Bridge karma. You don't want anyone talking about you, do you?
('Course you would might talk about all that balls-bumping if
you were young and today was time immemorial and you hid up in the bridge's
rafters at night with a buddy watching the action down below. What's the point
of going to all the trouble climbing up there and waiting of a Friday night
after the football game if you can't tell somebody about it? You just better be
ready to bust heads later to keep yours from getting cracked!)
But the guys who built the bridge and their next of kin sure
as hell won't talk about High Bridge Bridge being built by the Government when
they are fishing off of it. That'd be a downer no one wants to get into. Why
upset the fish?
The other way to Bare Ass Beach was the Warren-way. It's
harder than the easy-ass bridge route. Warren skipped down the back deck steps
from his house and shot down a narrow path that reminded him gravity was in
charge. The path probably had been carved out by the early trappers or earlier
than that by the Osqua. Warren bent his legs slightly at the knees and dug his
work boot heels in to drag against gravity as he skipped from one side of the
trail to the other to keep from losing control of the downward momentum. The
path was so narrow and deep that the trail was mainly sides, with the middle
being a deep scar down in the side of the hill. This stretch is about 200 yards
until it levels out and makes a turn to the left and you come to a clump of
hemlock and you can straighten up again as you approach the river plain.
In the cool darkness of the tall trees, invisible from the
Treeline Road, was an old house trailer, 10 feet wide - 50 feet long, covered
by a crusty blue tarp. The tarp, a shield against the world, hung down along
the door side of the trailer. It was Old Man Leggit's place. He was probably
inside. The feeling of the hanging tarp said,
Don't come in. Don't even knock.
Warren glanced up into the trees as he always did when he
reached this point in the trail, remembering what it was like when he walked
through here with Garson his first night in Fish Hawk Country. High overhead
but still concealed by the trees and running through them so that it was
resting in the crooks of branches was a line of PVC pipe covered by a roof of
tin gutter material for extra protection. Old Man Leggit had rigged this
pipeline up years ago to drain off parts of Rock Creek that were close to his
trailer. He'd set a battery powered sump pump at the beginning of the line that
kicked in when the water level got high enough there.
Give ol' Gink-Chaw-Chow back some of its uppity wetness, Old
Man Leggit thought, grumbling grunts as he stumbled around outside the trailer
to go grab a bucket of water from the River. It'd flood the whole area if it
could. Fuckin' River. It don't give a shit about me, but I sure as hell do!
Old Man Leggit thought he was pretty smart and he was. Pump all
that excess water back into the Fish Hawk. Pour the gift of his ornery grace back
into the soul of the River.
He figured the goddammed Oskey, as he called the Osqua, used
his Rock Creek, which looked like a drainage ditch separating two smooth flat
slabs of basalt, as a kitchen sink to clean their bowls and stone chiseled
knives.
Hell, he thought, Let ol' Gink-Chow-Chaw have some of its
dishwater back! Maybe if I look the other way it'll bless me in my sleep!
("Gink-Chow-Chaw" was Old Man Leggit's blasphemous corruption of the
terms the Osqua had for the unity-concept of two Fish Hawk Rivers, one
physical, the other spiritual, yet cosmically united.)
As he neared the tarp-covered trailer, Warren slowed his
pace. If Old Man Leggit was inside, and he probably was, it would be smart not to
make any noise. Leggit kept his .22 next to his bed. Warren wondered what he
thought of the drums from the beach but that would have to remain one of life's
mysteries. Warren smiled inwardly.
As he walked by the trailer he spoke at the tarp, uttering
the password, Coming through.
He heard some muffled sentences from inside the trailer and
what sounded like it might have been a question, followed by some muffled
laughter. It was garbled permission to pass, concession wrapped inside
confusion, amiability passing for insanity.
And Warren walked on, winking at a long knarled length of
dry rolled wood in various stages of decomposition. Bits of shavings were
tucked in crevices and grotesque wooden swirls erupted from edges like the body
parts of forest gargoyles. Looks like Old Man Leggit's elbows and kneecaps,
Warren thought.
A saggy wooden foot bridge with lodge pole railings crossed
Rock Creek to a short trail leading down to Bare Ass Beach. Warren stomped
across it, glad to be clear of the stealth that surrounded Old Man's Leggit's.
The bridge buckled some under the weight of his stride.
Bare Ass Beach was down the side of the hill by the Fish
Hawk. You could almost see it from Warren's house. The tall trees and thick
brush kept it mostly hidden. The River's current was roaring from the snow melt
up the mountain.
The Beach, sunny and clear and dazzling in the sunlight, was
a slanting shelf of hard craggy shale rock. Scattered shags of moss covered
portions of it. Some pebbly sand edged the beach in the middle of the summer
when the River receded. But this was spring and the only way anyone would feel
sand was to walk into the water.
Warren saw the white tee-pees and bon fires before he saw the
people. The tee-pees were slanted on a semi-grassy space that edged the
backside of the beach's rock surface. Several small fires flamed between and
around the tee-pees.
His nostrils rushed with the speed's leftover adrenaline
surge. His stomach was a vacant core. It was a familiar feeling he got whenever
he barged in on a party where he hadn't been invited. In his bones he didn't
know how to be. He knew no one. So he let the rush propel him and looked to
fill the emptiness with dope and booze. Worked every time.
The hippies wore buckskin vests and dirty corduroy bell
bottoms and sandals. Some were barefooted. They all had the look of new
griminess. If you got close enough, which Warren soon did to share a pipe with
several of them, you could smell the sour odor of several days of sweat.
Some of the women were topless. Others wore gingham dresses
tie-died in yellows, oranges, and blue. Some wore tie-died bras. All of the
women were bare-footed. Some played with small children, stacking the bigger
pebbles in piles or walking along the shallow water shoreline. A few toddlers
and children ran around the fires until one of the men calmly, but firmly told
them to cool it. Some older kids were skipping rocks in the River.
Warren guessed twenty hippies. He sauntered over to the
largest campfire, his ego expanding and his expectations in check. He said his
name to the guy who’d told the kids not to run around the fire. They shook
hands. Warren felt weird being polite, but he knew he was an intruder and he'd
get nowhere if they thought he was a narc.
The drum circle was behind the fire next to the
tee-pees. There were congas, bongos, and
a pair of tabla drums. The tablas sent a hollow bell-like sound up into the
air, causing Warren to grin broadly as he accepted a toke from a very pretty
hippie woman, obviously more willing to accept him there than they guys were.
She was topless, her breasts were small. They were very white in contrast to
her tan body, like she'd rubbed them with chalk. Her nipples pointed at the cool
morning air.
Warren made a point of passing the joint to the guy he'd
shook hands with - Stew. As the number made the rounds, others softly wandered
over to get a better look at him. They were all casual, non-effacing, but
Warren felt their curiosity, their tentative fear. Was he a narc? He saw that in their eyes. In his mind he could have
come across as a narc just to freak them out. But he wanted to get stoned and
check out the chicks. And make a point.
He went through the "interview" before he sat down
with them. He affected a strong mountain accent, dropping all his g’s at the
end of words, speaking very slowly, lazily, squinting as he toked, grinning as
he looked at the guys, saving an open-mouth smile for the ladies - the hint of
a wink in his eyes.
They were refugees from the rock concert festival circuit. And
Stew laid it out for Warren …
We just partied last night at this hu-uuuge concert out near
Portland in the woods. We saw Country Sam and the Hoots and Rawbone Dinah and
her new group. A helluva show, man! Rockin'! They jammed all night long. You
should have been there, man! It was a trip!
It was far out! another
said, in an almost contradictory, yet sympathetically enthusiastic tone, and he
accepted a joint from Warren, who accepted a pipe from a chick wearing faded
jeans and a vest and a headband.
That right? Warren asked, grinning.
Yeah, Stew went on. Some old timer there told us about this
Bare Ass Beach place and we had to check it out. Too bad it's too cold to get
nude, man.
Finally, after the pipe had gone around three or four times,
Warren felt mellow. No one was going to challenge him.
Well, he grinned looking around the circle at each of them.
He drawled his words out real slowly.
Welcome here to Bare Ass Beach. You all are right welcome to
hang out here and have a good time and all. There’s been parties here before
believe it or not. I’ve had a few good times down here myself.
He winked at Stew. Some of the guys snickered, needing to be
seen as knowing.
Just between you and me, though, - no big deal, you see? - I’d
keep it down at night if I was you. There are people living up and down the
River here. Quiet people. Most of 'em got guns if you follow me. Pretineer all
of 'em are serious hunters if you get my drift. (Warren mentally winced at
"pretineer." Old Man Leggit or Bardell would say that. So he stole it
from them for the occasion.)
He look-squinted at the woman’s breasts who’d handed him the
toke earlier, shrugged, and he looked over at Stew and took a pull off the pipe
as he froze his eyes on him.
I’d pay extra careful mind about the cabin up in there –
yonder.
And he pointed up at his house. You could barely see the
roof for all the trees, but there were no other houses up there. He kept
grinning but there was no mirth in his grin.
I’d stay clear away from that place if I was you. Cause that
fucker up there is crazy! And he’ll shoot your ass if he sees or smells you!
Warren clicked the roof of his mouth with the flat of his
tongue, jerked his head up in the direction of his house, and winked at Stew. He
handed the pipe to the chick, got up, cinched up his pants, saluted the group
with his index finger, and said,
So long, folks. Thanks a lot for the smoke. ‘Member what I
said now, and he tilted his head quickly up in the direction of his cabin,
winked one more time, turned around and headed out.
He walked away the opposite direction he came in and nodded
his head to the drums setting the time-beat for the River's roaring riff.
