“Why would I say that?”
“I don’t know.” My question frustrates him, so I leave it. He must have been dreaming.
When we come down to the living room I can smell the aroma from the frying trout in the kitchen. At one end of the room DeWeese is bent over the fireplace holding a match to some newspaper under the kindling. We watch him for a while.
“We use this fireplace all summer long”, he says.
I reply, “I’m surprised it’s this cold.”
Chris says he’s cold too. I send him back up for his sweater and mine as well.
“It’s the evening wind”, DeWeese says. “It sweeps down the canyon from up high where it’s really cold.”
The fire flares suddenly and then dies and then flares again from an uneven draft. It must be windy, I think, and look through the huge windows that line one wall of the living room. Across the canyon in the dusk I see the sharp movement of the trees.
“But that’s right”, DeWeese says. “You know how cold it is up there. You used to spend all your time up there.”
“It brings back memories”, I say.
A single fragment comes to mind now of night winds all around a campfire, smaller than this one before us now, sheltered in the rock against the high wind because there are no trees. Next to the fire are cooking gear and backpacks to help give wind shelter, and a canteen filled with water gathered from the melting snow. The water had to be collected early because above the timberline the snow stops melting when the sun goes down.
DeWeese says, “You’ve changed a lot.” He is looking at me searchingly. His expression seems to ask whether this is a forbidden topic or not, and he gathers from looking at me that it is. He adds, “I guess we all have.”
I reply, “I’m not the same person at all”, and this seems to put him a little more at ease. Were he aware of the literal truth of that, he’d be a lot less at ease. “A lot has happened”, I say, “and some things have come up that have made it important to try to untangle them a little, in my own mind at least, and that’s partly why I’m here.”
He looks at me, expecting something more, but the art instructor and his wife appear by the fireside and we drop it.
“The wind sounds like there’ll be a storm tonight”, the instructor says.
“I don’t think so”, DeWeese says.
Chris returns with the sweaters and asks if there are any ghosts up in the canyon.
DeWeese looks at him with amusement. “No, but there are wolves”, he says.
Chris thinks about this and asks, “What do they do?”
DeWeese says, “They make trouble for the ranchers.” He frowns. “They kill the young calves and lambs.”
“Do they chase people?”
“l’ve never heard of it”, DeWeese says and then, seeing that this disappoints Chris, adds, “but they could.”
At dinner the brook trout is accompanied by glasses of Bay county Chablis. We sit separately in chairs and sofas around the living room. One entire side of this room has the windows which would overlook the canyon, except that now it’s dark outside and the glass reflects the light from the fireplace. The glow of the fire is matched by an inner glow from the wine and fish and we don’t say much except murmurs of appreciation.
Sylvia murmurs to John to notice the large pots and vases around the room.
“I was noticing those”, John says. “Fantastic.”
“Those were made by Peter Voulkas”, Sylvia says.
“Is that right?”
“He was a student of Mr. DeWeese.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! I almost kicked one of those over.”
DeWeese laughs.
Later John mumbles something a few times, looks up and announces, “This does it — this just does the whole thing for us. Now we can go back for another eight years on Twenty-six-forty-nine Colfax Avenue.”
Sylvia says mournfully, “Let’s not talk about that.”
John looks at me for a moment. “I suppose anybody with friends who can provide an evening like this can’t be all bad.” He nods gravely. “I’m going to have to take back all those things I thought about you.”
“All of them?” I ask.
“Some, anyway.”
DeWeese and the instructor smile and some of the impasse goes away.
After dinner Jack and Wylla Barsness arrive. More living images. Jack is recorded in the tomb fragments as a good person who writes and teaches English at the college. Their arrival is followed by that of a sculptor from northern Montana who herds sheep for his income. I gather from the way DeWeese introduces him that I’m not supposed to have met him before.
DeWeese says he is trying to persuade the sculptor to join the faculty and I say, “I’ll try to talk him out of it”, and sit down next to him, but conversation is very sticky because the sculptor is extremely serious and suspicious, evidently because I’m not an artist. He acts like I’m a detective trying to get something on him, and it isn’t until he discovers I do a lot of welding that I become okay. Motorcycle maintenance opens strange doors. He says he welds for some of the same reasons I do. After you pick up skill, welding gives a tremendous feeling of power and control over the metal. You can do anything. He brings out some photographs of things he has welded and these show beautiful birds and animals with flowing metal surface textures that are not like anything else.
Later I move over and talk with Jack and Wylla. Jack is leaving to head an English department down in Boise, Idaho. His attitudes toward the department here seem guarded, but negative. They would be negative, of course, or he wouldn’t be leaving. I seem to remember now he was a fiction writer mainly, who taught English, rather than a systematic scholar who taught English. There was a continuing split in the department along these lines which in part gave rise to, or at least accelerated the growth of, Ph?drus’ wild set of ideas which no one else had ever heard of, and Jack was supportive of Ph?drus because, although he wasn’t sure he knew what Ph?drus was talking about, he saw it was something a fiction writer could work with better than linguistic analysis. It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.
DeWeese brings over some instructions for assembly of an outdoor barbecue rotisserie which he wants me to evaluate as a professional technical writer. He’s spent a whole afternoon trying to get the thing together and he wants to see these instructions totally damned.
But as I read them they look like ordinary instructions to me and I’m at a loss to find anything wrong with them. I don’t want to say this, of course, so I hunt hard for something to pick on. You can’t really tell whether a set of instructions is all right until you check it against the device or procedure it describes, but I see a page separation that prevents reading without flipping back and forth between the text and illustration… always a poor practice. I jump on this very hard and DeWeese encourages every jump. Chris takes the instructions to see what I mean.
But while I’m jumping on this and describing some of the agonies of misinterpretation that bad crossreferencing can produce, I’ve a feeling that this isn’t why DeWeese found them so hard to understand. It’s just the lack of smoothness and continuity which threw him off. He’s unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of artistic continuity, something an engineer couldn’t care less about. It hangs up, really, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about technology.
But Chris, meanwhile, takes the instructions and folds them around in a way I hadn’t thought of so that the illustration sits there right next to the text. I double-take this, then triple-take it and feel like a movie cartoon character who has just walked beyond the edge of a cliff but hasn’t fallen yet because he hasn’t realized his predicament. I nod, and there’s silence, and then I realize my predicament, then a long laughter as I pound Chris on the top of the head all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. When the laughter subsides, I say, “Well, anyway
