FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: Lost in Yellowstone (chapter 21)
CHAPTER 21
“Destroyed, but not defeated”
I stopped to rest on some logs on the right side of the trail somewhere between five and six p.m. that Thursday evening. I had traveled steadily all day, covering more miles on this Thursday than any singular day, traveling almost non-stop from early until late.
As evening came on, I began tossing over in my mind the more what I was going to do in a couple more hours when the sun went down, there in the wild without a tent or a sleeping bag. It had been several hours since Mr. Moffit had rounded the bend out of sight, and I had not seen a single soul since, and he was the first we had seen in over fifty hours. But I had one more meeting yet to go – with a Mr. Lyons and a Mr. DiMaggio – the last visitors I would have before the eight-hundred-pound one. That encounter was looming yonder, just over the horizon, over a hill less than a mile away. I cannot help but feel that that meeting had been scheduled my whole life, and now it was almost here. My heavy-set brown and blonde friend had made his way to the stream ahead of me, I suppose, awaiting my arrival within the hour. Our paths would soon cross. It really is funny how life works.
After my friend Mr. Moffit had finished his work, only two others stood between me and my up-close encounter with the special friend. Mr. Lyons and Mr. DiMaggio’s arrival was not inconspicuous. I heard them coming from quite a distance, because as they walked the trail Mr. Lyons called out, “Hey bear, hey bear, hey bear,” every ten seconds. They obviously were very ‘bear conscious,’ similar to my friend Todd who was by now two or three miles up ahead.
The two gentlemen stopped along the roadside, as did all the hikers we met along the
trail. I explained that I had sent Todd on ahead to find a campsite, if possible, but that I was preparing to sleep on the side of the trail if necessary. Mr. DiMaggio – a shorter man than his friend and dark-headed – advised me, “If you’re caught out here alone and it gets dark, just hunker down on the trail. Somebody is always coming down the trail. It’ll be the safest place.”
I had to cringe at the thought, though – because I knew that more than humans frequented these trails; and at night it would not be ideal to have a bear run up on you. I asked my two friends if I should leave my flashlight on to discourage animals, but they advised to save my battery. I do not know if it is a good thing or bad, but I was preparing for the worse, although it would be some time before having to make a decision.
After about a five-minute visit, Mr. Lyons and DiMaggio were on their way, and as they did, they did so with the rapid speed and skill of experienced hikers. I watched them, as I had all the others, fade out of view, and the chant of ‘Hey bear’ also faded, along with the evening sun.
I paused one moment more before going on, reminding me once again of the horseman in Frost’s poetic winter-time scene, smiling a little as I took it all in. Another poignant irony was playing out in real time. I could not then – and still now – help but reflect on life's array of dreams and disappointments, its successes and failures, its best of times and worst of times all, wrapped up curiously in a singular hike up and down mountains in a remote region of the world.
Pausing that evening, my mind went all the way back more than half a century, all because of Mr. DiMaggio.
Stepping out on the trail to resume this journey, my mind went back as I walked.
When I was a boy, I would go regularly to the fire station that was down a hill by a vacant lot next to my white, modest wood-framed Juniper Street home. Sometimes I would go to buy cigarettes for my Uncle Bobby, my Daddy’s little brother, when he came over to visit our next- door neighbor, his in-laws. Bobby would give me a nickel for going, and I could buy two cookies or five pieces of bubble gum with that.
Sometimes Bobby’s sister-in-law, Faye, who still lived at home, would catch me outside playing and get me to go over to the station to buy her some B.C. powder and a Coke. She didn’t smoke, for sure, as she was one of the most virtuous women I ever knew. She was always a hero to me and my best friend Coca-Cola Mike as we grew up. She also gave me a dime, which made her even more virtuous. I walked away with twice the loot when I ran her errands. With that, I could jump on my bike and ride a mile down Juniper and buy one or two packs of baseball cards – and get the best gum in the world inside as a bonus. I do not know if I ever got the baseball card I’m going to tell you about; but I am sure my brother Wayne did.
The firemen at the station knew me well, called me ‘Lucky Strike,’ my uncle's brand of cigarettes. They also knew me because of other summertime visits. Since we did not have a TV – a luxury that did not come along until I hit double digits – I would also go to the station at noon during the summer. I remember barging in as though I owned the place, plopping down in the best recliner in their TV room, and watching the noon movie, called ‘Armchair Playhouse.’ Some details stay with you a lifetime.
One movie that stuck with me when I carried the title of ‘Lucky Strike’ was a movie about an unlucky old fisherman whose nickname in his poor Cuban village was ‘Salao’ – meaning the worst kind of bad luck. The old man, lamentably, had gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. Of all the movies I watched during those years, this is the one I most remember. I was glued to the TV, mesmerized, by the old man’s tale of going out to sea on this fateful occasion and hooking a marlin. Ah, it was huge, bigger, he knew, than any fish any fisherman in his village had ever caught. But it was too big, too strong, and the fish carried the old man further and further out to sea, controlling him, possessing him, draining him of every ounce of energy the old man had in his body.
But, ah, the old man would not give up. His wilderness was the sea, his bear a fish. He fisticuffed with that fish day and night, a classic, epic battle between man and beast. The sun beat down on the old fisherman, too, becoming another nemesis, sucking any energy from him that the fish might have left. Pulling and tug-a-warring with that marlin twisted his back until it stretched every muscle and ligament in his thin body. It was all he could do to hold on.
Sometimes the marlin would relax, as if playing a game, and the old man would relax, close his eyes for a moment, searching just for a tiny respite; but the marlin, at the right time, would seize his own opportunity to sprint in the water; and the fishing line the old man held in his hand would rip into his hand like a knife, leaving his hands bloody and torn as it unwound.
As a nine-year-old boy, that grand struggle made an impression, stayed with me through the years. I do not know when I realized what that story was, but I would in time. After enduring the hot, humid Houston sun bricklaying, and fisticuffing through a hundred college classes (it seemed) for the first decade of marriage beginning in 1975, I knew how the old man felt in that movie that captivated me at that fire station back then.
But I had another sea just over the horizon as I set sail back in those days, beginning in 1984: in the front of an English classroom at North Shore in Houston. Late in the fall my first year, I remember it well, we had the chance to teach our first novel. I can never forget the first day to stand and teach a literary tale to a group of high school freshmen; and I remember thinking how magical that first day of teaching literature was. Of all the novels we had read in college, this first one never came into the curriculum, and I read it for the first time along with my students. There is a magic in that, too. And it is fitting – more than fitting – that the first novel I would teach was the most popular Hemingway novel, “The Old Man and the Sea”.
It was the story I had immersed myself as a young boy, long, long ago.
There it was, just as I remembered, the agony of a poor unlucky old man in the fight of a lifetime, a fight for a fish, a fight for respect. Along the way as he unravels this riveting tale, Mr. Hemingway makes an observation about the old man I will always carry with me. A man may be destroyed but not defeated, he had said; and at my first reading of the thought, it is as if it were etched in my mind.
A man may be destroyed but not defeated.
You can quote it, you can teach it, and you can live it.
I was living it here in the depths of Yellowstone.