Excerpt:
The best days of all were when Robert Lee went visiting and
took me along. Visiting meant driving north— never south for some reason, and
never to a town or city— but always to somewhere remote and out of the way,
invariably down a narrow winding dirt or gravel road to some tucked-up little
place in a hemlock grove or on the bank of a creek or at the wooded edge of a
pasture. Robert Lee didn't seem to know anyone who lived in town or, more
probably, no one who lived in town would have wanted Robert Lee showing up
unannounced on their doorstep. He was not a sight for civilized eyes.
He stood
six feet four inches, was well into his sixties, was inordinately strong, and
all-in-all possessed the physique of a medium-sized bear. He seemed to have
just one set of clothes which he washed rarely if ever, and in which he
appeared to sleep, even to his boots. His hair was perpetually tousled as if
he'd just crawled out of a hollow log, and he usually wore three or four
days-worth of stubble. There was no running water on Robert Lee’s property, but
he did have that big icy river close at hand which he could always make use of
when absolutely necessary. I tried to stay upwind of him just as a general
precaution.
As Robert
Lee's sidekick, I visited out-of-the-way parts of the Peninsula that I would
never have seen otherwise and met a cast of distinctive backwoods characters
who lived too far off the grid to have ever been encountered under normal
circumstances. In Robert Lee’s company I felt I was seeing a part of the old
America that had long since vanished everywhere else except maybe in forgotten
pockets of Appalachia or the deep South, or far up the road in Alaska. We
traveled in whatever old wreck from his junkyard was deemed most road-worthy at
the time. None of them was actually licensed, but that didn't seem to concern
Robert Lee in the least, and I certainly didn't give it a thought.
The car we
used most often was a low-slung rusted sedan whose make I can no longer call to
mind. It was a good old runner on the whole but for one crippling peculiarity.
The transmission had seen better days and possessed neither a workable first
gear, nor a reverse. Driving without first gear didn't present much of a
problem, provided you started out on a downhill slope. You could even start out
on the level in second gear, if you had the right touch, and for a veteran
trucker like Robert Lee it presented no problem at all. Reverse was another
matter, for you could very easily find yourself on a backwoods road that just
petered out, where the option of reverse was an absolute necessity.
On one
occasion we were bouncing along on a narrow gravel road that ended abruptly at
the edge of a precipitous ravine. As soon as we saw the drop-off dead ahead,
but still a few dozen yards off, I assumed Robert Lee would brake to a stop,
get out and assess the situation and ponder our options but, without hesitation
and much to my horror, he stomped the pedal, barreled straight ahead toward
certain destruction and, at the last possible moment, slammed the brakes,
wrenched the wheel as hard as could with a blood-curdling Yahoo! and
basically spun that heavy old sedan around on a dime, splattering every tree in our immediate vicinity with gravel. He didn’t
actually pull off a complete 180— it was hardly even a 120— but it was just
enough that he could then coax the old wreck completely around and off we went,
rattling back to the highway. To this day I still don't quite see how he pulled
it off. We had come close enough to that ravine that I could stare down into
oblivion, and I was truly shaken. "God damn it Robert Lee,” I
shouted, “if I'd known you were gonna pull a fool stunt like that, I'd have
jumped out!" Robert Lee just looked straight ahead with a big grin.
"Son," he said (he always called me Son), "That was nuthin'.
Purely nuthin' "
Notwithstanding
Robert Lee’s grubby demeanor and backwoods hygiene, folks generally seemed
pleased to see him. In the old country way, he would just drop in unannounced, —
not that there were any practical alternatives to such casual sociability. It’s
not like anyone had a telephone! The
custom of neighbors and friends dropping in on neighbors and friends was as
well-established as the countryside itself. Sometimes we would all just stand
around and talk— sometimes, if there were chairs or stumps, everyone would take
a seat— and sometimes, if there was an actual house, we might be invited in.
Once we
called on a woman who was probably in her late thirties living in a small house
at the edge of a forest with her teenage daughter. They were
both memorably beautiful, with fine-boned delicate features, long dark hair and
graceful dresses that reached to their workboots. The mother was soft-spoken
and gracious, and obviously took pleasure and amusement in Robert Lee’s
rollicking geniality. Robert Lee, for his part, was his usual gregarious self,
rambling on happily about nothing in particular. The daughter was shy and
mostly silent. The mother invited us in, sat us at her kitchen table and served
us bowls of miso soup, the first I had ever tasted. It was unexpectedly smoky,
and delicious. Then we were out the door and down the road.
On another
occasion we parked at the end of a twisting gravel road and hiked a quarter
mile or so through moss-hung forest somewhere along the Hoh River until we came
to a spacious shadowy grove of old alders, carpeted in oxalis and fern. A
balding fellow of indeterminate age with a long beard was snoring loudly on a
bed of fronds in a lean-to of cedar boughs, and when Robert Lee hollered a loud
drawn-out halloooo, the poor fellow lurched out sideways like a crab,
tripped over a log and pitched headlong into the ferns. He wasn't accustomed to
visitors and didn't seem overly-pleased to see us— and moreover was three or
four sheets to the wind.
As soon as he had
recovered his composure somewhat, he made a show of hospitality by inviting us to
sit on a mossy log with him and share some swigs from his bottle of rye whiskey,
an offer that it would have been rude of us to refuse, so we didn't. It took
him a few minutes and quite a few swigs to recover his voice, and as he
gathered himself I looked over his lean-to. There were several layers of
plastic sheeting beneath the cedar branches, and a good-sized trench all around
the structure that was ditched away into the woods on the lower side to handle
the run-off, but I still couldn't work out how it would offer enough protection
during the winter rains.
Robert Lee
asked him what the occasion was for his one-man celebration and he said he had
lived there in his woodsy abode for two years now, to the very day, and had
nothing to show for it but a very cunning little woodstove that he had
constructed from a large coffee can using nothing but his Bowie knife. It was,
in fact, a piece of admirable workmanship— an entire little functioning
woodstove no more than a foot tall, with a hinged door and a stovepipe
contrived from several tin cans. I'd never seen the like, but it was the
perfect size for that little lean-to. The only disadvantage that I could see
was that it could burn nothing larger than a clothespin, which meant spending
quite a lot of time every day just whittling wood.
I tried to console the
fellow by suggesting that his stove was something he could be proud of, and he
owned that he was proud of it, but that he had nothing else to show for
two years of living there and wasn't proud of that at all. Which is why
on this day— the second anniversary of his time in the woods— he was devoting
his full attention to drinking rotgut rye until he passed out.
As the
poor fellow was well into the maudlin stage by this time and making straight
for stark insensibility, where he might unsheath that big knife of his and
start mindlessly waving it about, we wished him a good day and slipped back
into the woods as inconspicuously as we could.
Not long
after that I ran into the same fellow again, at one of Robert Lee's impromptu
outdoor get-togethers that he hosted whenever he was feeling more than usually
sociable. I asked how he was faring and alluded to our recent visit to his
campsite. He had not the least recollection that we had ever met.
Another
time Robert Lee and I dropped in on a small, determined woman in her
mid-twenties, living alone along a river in a shelter she had built herself.
She had located it out of sight in a dense alder grove, but within walking
distance of the county dump, which had apparently provided most of her
furnishings. She was visibly proud of her little home in the woods, and had filled it with hanging baskets of
ferns and wildflowers. Robert Lee took his time and looked around at what she
had built and patiently listened as she pointed out some of the finer features,
and then gave it his hearty seal of approval.
It didn’t
take long to work out that most of Robert Lee’s friends were young enough to be
his grandchildren, and that they were predominantly of the long-haired hippie
variety— resilient back-to-landers intent on self-sufficiency and independence.
And it wasn’t hard to see why they genuinely admired Robert Lee, as I did, for
his flagrant contempt for all things bureaucratic and for all the sly,
ingenious stratagems he had devised to circumvent them. Like most of the older,
traditional residents of the Peninsula, Robert Lee had a sure instinct for
self-sufficiency, which meant he knew how to get along without 90% of what
urban folks considered absolute necessities, while possessing the full range of
essential backcountry tools and skills to make it all work.
Robert Lee
helped folks out as a matter of course, without making a point of it. I came to
understand that the primary reason he drove all over the Peninsula wasn’t so
much to stave off loneliness, as simply to keep an eye on his young friends
(none of whom had lived in the country for nearly as long as he had)— just to
make certain they were getting along.
