Sometime in January, 1974, Omanson received divorce papers from his wife. Caught off-guard and emotionally crushed, he just signed the papers and contested nothing, and determined to remain in the woods for the rest of the winter alone. He concentrated on laying in firewood and laying in books and, when not attending to basic needs, he spent his days reading, taking long treks into the countryside and along the coast, and writing his first poems.
Read Part 2, Working in a Shake Mill.
Alone at Last
Before December was half over, it was clear that neither Mitch nor John intended to stay. Mitch had taken up with a young woman named Liz and her infant child, and together they had rented a small trailer in a trailer park north of Forks. With the advent of unbroken cold rain, Mitch had had his fill of wilderness life and determined he would see his way through the next four months of winter nights with the warm solace of a shared bed and propane heat. John, for his part, was eschewing winter altogether and hitchhiking straight through to New Mexico. “I’ll be back in April or May,” he assured me.
When I announced I wasn’t going anywhere, but intended to see out the winter alone, right there in that shelter on the Calawah, they both wagered I wouldn’t last a month. Mitch did his level best to talk me out of it, while John, who knew me better and knew how pig-headed I was, just shrugged and said I was nuts.
Mitch pointed out that I was six miles from town and the nearest phone and had no way to get help if I injured myself or got sick. That I would have to get up at four or earlier every morning to get to the mill on time. He even went so far as to claim that stronger men than I had despaired and shot themselves rather than face one more winter of unending rain in those woods— and on and on and on. Mitch had spent four years in the Marines, with a tour in Vietnam, and as my older, more experienced and worldly cousin, he apparently felt a responsibility for me.
Both John and Mitch knew of the rare minor successes and more notable failures so far in my life— of the multiple times I had run away as an adolescent— of the multiple times I had been expelled from high school, until I finally dropped out— of the many jobs I had walked away from— of my run-ins with the police— and of the two weeks spent in a locked psychiatric ward after a bungled suicide attempt. Their skepticism that I was cut out for a winter alone in the woods was understandable.
But somehow I knew that if everyone would just go away and leave me alone, I would be fine. It wasn’t bravado. It was a certainty in my bones that most of the problems in my life up to that time had come from well-meaning individuals who knew better than I did what was best for me and had stepped in to straighten me out for my own good. I’d gotten a bellyfull of it years before, but only now, for the first time, would I have a chance to live my life on my own terms, without interference.
That was how I saw it at the time, but my assessment was neither fair nor accurate. No one was to blame for my foul-ups but myself, and those who had intervened along the way were just trying to help me out.
But in that bleak rainy November in the woods in my twenty-second year, I was moving toward a place where no one could reach me. I had never had to rely entirely on myself before, and now that was exactly what I wanted. I was secretly delighted that everyone was leaving. My marriage was coming apart, I was estranged from most of my family and all but three or four of my friends had drifted away. I was finding it more and more difficult to be around people at all, and I felt as though I were suffocating.
I needed space. And time. A few miles of space, and at least a winter’s worth of time— alone.
On Christmas Day, I am Flooded Out
My first Christmas on the Peninsula was passed quietly in a trailer park a few miles north of Forks. Mitch and Liz had taken pity on me and invited me to share Christmas dinner with them, though there was barely room for the three of us at the tiny table in their cramped trailer kitchen. Still, it was more civilization than I had seen in a couple of months, and with liberal helpings of wine and weed to accompany the turkey and dressing, a very pleasant time was had by all. I stayed on through most of the afternoon, had a light supper of leftovers, after which Mitch gave me a ride back to my shelter.
Where the logging road crossed over the Calawah on a one-lane bridge, we looked down at the rushing torrent (it had rained heavily all that day), and were startled to see a number of blocks of firewood and a can of kerosene being swept away by the current. “That’s not good,” I said. Five minutes later we were at the camp and found a month’s supply of firewood gone without a trace, and the rising river already lapping at the shelter. Mitch offered to stay and lend a hand, but he had no way to contact Liz, so I insisted he return home before she had reason to worry. “I can deal with this,” I told him.
So off he drove, just as night was settling in. The rain was steady, mixed with snow and sleet, and it was getting colder. I cursed myself for having built so close to the river, at the bottom of a steep, sixty-foot slope. In addition to the rising water, the heavy rain had loosened a number of large rocks the size of pumpkins and these had tumbled down the slope while I had been away and crashed into the back of the shelter. It was clear that I would have to dismantle the shelter at once and somehow move everything to higher ground.
The first order of business was to climb the slope and discover whether or not there was enough level ground at the top of it to build a new shelter. This proved no easy task as the slope was slick with mud and ice and so steep that I could only scale it by grabbing hold of the smaller alders that grew out of the slope at an angle and pull myself up a foot or two at a time, also using the alders as footholds where they angled into the steep ground. I had to pick my way with care. I could feel little pellets of sleet in the rain, I was soaked through, and it was growing dark.
Fortunately there was level ground at the top of the slope with enough advantageously spaced alders about as thick as my leg to provide a strong frame for a new shelter. I climbed back down the slope as carefully as I could, knowing that if I slipped and fell and broke a bone that it might be days before I would be found, since Mitch no longer worked at the mill and had no reason to keep track of me, and no one at the mill even knew where I lived.
Getting all my possessions up the slope required a number of ascents, as I was restricted to what I could carry with one arm, having to pull myself up with the other. Each ascent was a nerve-wracking, grueling effort, requiring all my strength and concentration, repeatedly slipping and catching myself while clutching my load. I have no idea now how many trips up that hateful slope were required in the end, but I do know that it was daylight before I finished.
The real monster was the 55-gallon drum of my wood stove. I had to push it up ahead of myself like Sisyphus and his boulder, finding footholds where I could, often struggling to wrench it to one side or the other, and even to shove it up lengthwise, trying to muscle it through the narrow gaps between trees. The higher I went, the steeper the slope, until it was almost vertical at the end, just as my strength was at its lowest ebb. Several times I nearly lost the drum altogether. Finally I was operating on sheer reckless abandon, lurching my way up the steep slope in freezing rain, miles from anywhere, in the deep-gray dawn twilight.
But at last I got the drum up to the top and shoved it over the edge, after which I lay beside it in the rain for I know not how long, trying to gather my strength for all that still lay ahead. At that point I had managed to move everything up to high ground except the most important thing of all: the heavy visqueen sheeting that was still nailed to the alder frame below. Without it, I would have no shelter at all. Somehow I had to unfastern it from the frame without tearing it to shreds, and then manhandle it up the slope. The sheeting was nailed to the alder poles through strips of cedar, which served to hold the sheeting in place and keep it from ripping loose in a high wind. In theory, it shouldn’t have been too difficult to pull the strips loose with the claw of a hammer, and to do so with enough finesse that the plastic wasn’t slashed in the process. In theory!
In fact, the results were a lot messier than they should have been, but under the circumstances it was a wonder I could even lift my arm at that point. The whole process was considerably impeded by the river itself, which by this time was flowing right through the shelter so that I was standing in rushing icy water above my ankles. Nevertheless, somehow or other, I worked the sheeting loose, managed to fold it up into a great awkward bale wound about with rope and twine— then slowly, and with the greatest difficulty, drag it up the slope, constantly snagging it on the rocks, trees and shrubbery. At least it was easier than wrestling that 55-gallon drum.
Once I had the bundle of sheeting on level land above the slope with everything else, the hardest work was done, but I still had no shelter, no fire, no way of drying out or warming up, and the temperature was still just above freezing. At least it had finally stopped raining, and the dawn had arrived, though it was the grayest and most dispirited dawn I could remember.
I selected four standing alders that formed a rough square and chopped them off at a height of about seven feet with my axe, then chopped down four smaller alders for the “stringer” poles and secured them in place with four-inch spikes, using the backside of my axe as a mallet. I then built a frame on one of the walls to hold the sheet of corrugated tin with the stovepipe hole and, once that was secured, I wrapped the entire frame in the sheeting, with a cutaway for the corrugated tin. I left one unsecured corner for the entrance flap. Then, using boards from the old shelter, I built an elevated bed platform. Finally, at the end, I set up my stove and stovepipe. Everything was soaking wet.
I then spent a fruitless hour or two trying to start a fire with green, wet branches, which is all I had for fuel— all my seasoned firewood having been lost to the river. I had dry matches but no dry kindling at all, and I could find nothing dry in the woods around my shelter. By this time I was lurching around like one of the walking dead. I rolled out my new mummy bag which, somehow, miraculously, I had managed to keep dry. I peeled off my sodden, muddy clothes and crawled inside. My body temperature was so low that I could not generate any heat at all, and I felt very clammy, weak and nauseous. I knew I was in trouble. At some point my body began to shake quite violently, and I shook non-stop for what seemed like several hours, but even with all that shaking and shuddering I was still unable to produce any heat. The shaking was completely involuntary; I had no control over it. Every part of my body was in pain. But in the end it saved me. I very gradually began to warm up and, as I did, my body slowly stopped shaking. I fell into a deep, comatose sleep for what was left of the day and all the following night.
On the second day I crawled out of my bag and pulled on my sodden muddy clothes and my sodden muddy socks and boots, and went out into the sodden woods in search of anything I could burn. This time, after my long sleep and with a clearer head, I finally had some luck. Inside an enormous hollow spruce I found several double handfuls of bone-dry punkwood, and it was just what I needed. I collected a great pile of dead twigs and pine needles and, though they were fairly wet, I figured I could feed them into my punkwood fire slowly enough that I could burn off the moisture little by little and gradually build up the fire. My chances were not improved by having to build my fire at the bottom of a wet steel drum which I could scarcely reach and which had only a meager draft, but finally, by blowing through the drainhole till I could hardly draw breath, I got a small fire started which I was able to keep alive. Once it was well underway, and after burning a modest log or two, I celebrated with a warmed-up can of pork and beans.
Encounter with a Sasquatch?
One morning, while it was still dark, when I was about two miles out from my shelter, walking down the center of a logging road on way my into work at the shake mill, I was astonished when a large conifer just behind me, up on the bank above the road, began shaking of its own accord. There was no wind, and this really sizeable tree, perhaps thirty or forty feet high, was swinging back and forth as though some invisible Hercules or Titan had taken hold of it and was shaking it like a child’s rattle.
Then the tree grew still and the tree next to it started to shake in just the same manner. The hair stood right up on the back of my neck and I started to move quickly down the road. After trotting some distance, I looked back and saw that the shaking had stopped. So I stopped and and tried to calm myself down. Suddenly a third tree closer to me started to shake. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I shouted and began banging my lunch pail on the packed gravel road. I shrieked and howled and jumped up and down and shouted threats. Then I stopped, exhausted. The shaking started again. I took off down the road, not running but definitely not waiting around, and again the shuddering trees followed me. Otherwise, nothing else was moving or making a sound. I figured it wasn’t a bear or a bull elk, as neither beast behaves in such a manner, although only a very powerful bear or elk would have been big enough to shake such large trees. I knew if either animal wanted to intimidate me they could just step into the open and charge, though of course neither animal would feel threatened by me in the first place if I were just out in the middle of the road by myself. They would have no reason to step out and face me. I also knew absolutely that no man, however large and strong, could even begin to shake trees of that size. Short of Paul Bunyan, maybe, but I was pretty sure he’d been dead for a while. I had no idea what I was dealing with. I was thoroughly rattled. Eventually, whatever it was left me and I continued on to work without further incident. I never did see what it was.
Only later did I learn that there is only one species of animal on the planet that shakes bushes or trees as a means of intimidation, namely primates. And the only primate in North America large enough to shake such big trees would of course be a Sasquatch. If such a creature even exists. I don’t know if they exist or not, as I’ve never seen one. I’m not one of those true believers who is emotionally invested in the idea of a big primate roaming the American wilderness. The subject never interested me all that much, as I never really believed it.
But something followed me for a half mile or so, shaking big trees at me. I know that much.
I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation, without having to resort to a child’s fable. There must be something else out there in the woods that acts like a primate and is big enough to shake large trees. The ghost of Paul Bunyan, for instance. Or maybe aliens. Or Russians— they’re pretty big.
Settling in for a Solitary Winter
I remained in that shelter on the Calawah, six miles outside of Forks, for the rest of the winter. Now that I was divorced I no longer needed to send money back to Illinois, which meant that, after I had saved a small nest egg to cover my minimal needs through the winter, I could quit working for a couple of months and not have to face the long, cold walk to the mill each morning. I concentrated on building up a supply of dry firewood and making my shelter more homelike by building a bookcase to go at the head of my sleeping platform and fashioning several hand-split cedar boxes with leather hinges, for clothes and general storage.
In those long weeks above the Calawah, without visitors, huddled by the stove and gazing out at the all-but-endless rain, it was difficult not to succumb to a serious funk. Whenever the rain relented for a spell, I took long climbing hikes into the foothills, seeking out eminences with extended views of the countryside. Most days I practiced yoga, building on several years experience— and meditation, for which I had little aptitude. Still, despite my limitations, I could feel myself beginning to relax inwardly and I felt an increased sense of distance between myself and the world that slowed things down and and gave me some breathing space.
More days than not, the rain was relentless. Now and then I was able to catch a ride to Port Angeles, whenever a few tree-planter friends put together an expedition to the “big city” for supplies. For me, Port Angeles, above all, meant books, and I very quickly located two or three first-rate bookstores— both used and new. Even the food co-ops carried books on eastern mysticism, which was one of my serious interests in those days.
I soon realized that my worst enemy was my own thoughts— that, if I allowed them, they would take me into morbid, self-destructive places that it was hard to find my way back out of. Hiking and yoga helped, certainly, but it was reading that mattered most of all. Throughout those long rainy days I read and read and kept on reading. The wonderful thing about wilderness solitude was the long stretches of time it afforded: the uninterrupted hours and days when you could read one long book after another for as long as you liked, whenever you liked. I had to lay in firewood and I had to walk into town for basic supplies every week or two, and I did a great deal of hiking and hill-climbing and exploring the river and its tributaries and miles of coastline, but I always carried two or three books in my knapsack and, no matter what else I was doing, I always found time to read. In poor weather I would read all day and in fine weather I would still read several hours a day. It was the first time in my life that my time was entirely my own and I made the most of it: Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Kerouac, Snyder, Kesey, Dostoyevsky, Chuang Tzu, Basho, Issa, Neihardt, Castenada, Krishnamurti, Yogananda, Gurdjieff, Trungpa, Merton, Remarque, Watts, Jung, Jeffers, a little of the Bhagavad Gita and a good deal of the New Testament.
Hanshan, the Mad Hermit Poet
Somewhere along the line my cousin Mitch, the ex-Marine sergeant, gave me some poems that he had copied out by hand and had been carrying around in his jacket pocket for a long time, but had finally decided to pass along. Smudged and worn and split at the creases, they were translations by Gary Snyder of the eighth-century Chinese poet Hanshan, a mad old hermit who lived in a cave above the Yellow River on a place known as Cold Mountain, which was both an actual place and a state of mind. Later, in a Port Angeles bookshop, I found a little hardcover copy of Burton Watson’s translations of one hundred of Hanshan’s poems, along with a summary of his life and his significance.
My encounter with these short handwritten poems by a Chinese hermit living in a cave in the wilderness thirteen centuries ago, while I was living alone in the wilderness myself, marked a fundamental fork in the road of my life. From that point onward, for better or worse, I became a poet, and have never looked back.
Besides the similarity in our living situations, a number of Hanshan’s poems spoke directly to my frame of mind at the time, his poems of self-pity and sadness: frank unapologetic complaints describing his physical misery, loneliness and poverty in a remote wilderness, that fit my then-current circumstances to a T.
I was drawn as well to the architecture of the poems— like snowflakes or leaves on a particular tree— all following one basic pattern but no two identical, mirroring the organizing principal of Nature herself.
As I delved more deeply into poetry, I began to wonder about its origins, but I lacked access to a serious library. I built a stone circle overlooking the river and contemplated the origins of poetry in the crumbling embers of a pinewood fire, origins so ancient as to be lost in obscurity— the poetry of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers whose verses were sung rather than written— the very earliest poetry indistinguishable from the howling of wolves or the sighing of wind through pines.
I conceived of the very earliest poetry as I conceived of dreams, as something emerging straight out of Nature, straight from the Cosmos. It wasn’t an idea I was prepared to defend rationally. It was simply how I visualized it to myself, as a child might, or as someone might who has spent too many weeks alone in a winter forest, watching sparks from a fire mingling with the stars.
It wasn’t long before I was trying my hand at such plain little poems myself, in the manner of Hanshan— though of course what I was imitating wasn’t his actual poems, but English translations written in Snyder’s and Watson’s contemporary colloquial diction. My initial efforts were far from promising, but I would revise and polish them in the weeks and months to come, and for the rest of my year on the Peninsula. The final result was a series of fourteen eight-line poems, based on personal circumstance, distilled and partly fictionalized. I was learning to describe and incorporate metaphors from the natural world, and to fashion a rudimentary persona that would give me a voice of my own.
What I failed to do in the process of writing these poems— if I even conceived of it, which I doubt— was to uncover a central unifying symbol, like Hanshan’s esoteric ‘Cold Mountain’ or Melville’s demonic white whale, or Twain’s all-encompassing river, that would infuse the sequence, contextualize its particulars, and at least hint at an underlying cosmology. But that would be the work of a lifetime, and not just one winter.
That these were slight poems employing rhetorical clichés is unsurprising, but not really the point. The poems were a tangible beginning. I had discovered a path and was taking my first steps upon it.
1.
A full seven miles is what I must hike
to make it each day by dawn to the mill.
It is heavy monotonous work and more
precarious than I ever let on
to my wife a thousand miles away—
my wife who awaits the pay I send
at the end of each week— my loving wife
whose letters I look for in vain.
2.
In no time at all it has come to this:
penniless, homeless— my jacket is worn
and both of my boots are like leaky boats.
A letter just yesterday from my wife
says another man now sleeps in my bed.
Last week a storm and a flood: my hut
was swept away. Now I peer from under
a hemlock bough. Will this rain never end?
3.
With nothing remaining, I struggle to build
another shelter on higher ground,
a heap of leaves and ferns for a bed
and a smoky fire to dry me out.
Yet everything leaks and I cough all night
and wish I had something strong to drink.
I heat up an old can of pork & beans,
but it’s only beans— no pork at all!
4.
There is no good way to approach this place—
a tortuous trail up a rocky gorge,
a crumbling ledge along a sheer cliff—
you must cling to root and sapling to keep
from tumbling into the river below—
so far below that the sound it makes,
rising through foliage-clouds and mist,
is faint as the breath of a sleeping girl.
5.
Regardless of how I upbraid myself,
I can do nothing but think of her,
of how I might possibly turn her heart—
letters or prayers or potions, what use?
Nothing will kindle cold ashes again.
Last night I lay on the frozen ground
and stared between hemlock boughs at the stars
and prayed that my heart might turn to ice.
6.
After days and weeks on the sodden slopes,
cutting cords of cedar blocks or working
deck at the mill or setting choker
for some gyppo outfit along the Hoh,
I make up my mind to just pack it in.
I collect my pay, hike back to my hut
and, hanging my boots beside the fire,
consign myself to a winter alone.
7.
A raven perched on a withered branch
appraises my paltry circumstance
with a tilt of its head. Begone old bird!
I pick up a stone and hurtle it hard
at the raven’s head. It squawks and flies.
Now all my sense of purpose is spent.
I toss another stone in the river
and bitterly laugh as it sinks from sight.
8.
No wallet, no cards, no postal address,
no licenses or a telephone—
nothing at all to pin me down
or prove I exist— except for a mouse
who, every night as I sleep, yanks hair
from my head to re-upholster its nest.
I pass my days and my nights alone.
Most mornings I talk to the river.
9.
I have had no news of the outside world
in over a month, but the world goes on
with or without me. What do I care?
I have news of my own: only last week
a section of hollow log tumbled down
from somewhere upriver and wedged itself
between two rocks, creating a little
waterfall that dances and sings!
10.
I can see no reason to rise from my bed
on such a sodden morning as this.
I tend the fire from where I lie
with a pile of cedar bark and twigs
and I count every little drop that falls
from the slender tip of a nearby leaf—
over seven hundred and fifty so far,
as regular as the pulse in my wrist.
11.
An hour past dawn— a vertical shaft
of sunlight skewers my leaky roof,
transfiguring all of these spiderwebs
into glistening nets of tiny stars.
Relax, old spiders, be at your ease—
I must bow and scrape to a wife no more.
I sweep no corners clean. You can spin
your pretty webs to your hearts’ content.
12.
Stooping and picking through scattered slash
on a clear-cut slope not far from this place,
I bundle up broken shafts and shards
of cedar and haul them back to my hut.
No other wood so brilliantly burns
or so poorly cradles a bed of coals,
and no other wood so brightly flares
or with such ambrosia soothes the soul.
13.
From atop a boulder I peer straight down
into an icy crystalline pool
encircled in moss where a steelhead trout
lurks in the shadows, an ancient fish
as long as my leg and old as the hills.
How is it, Grandfather, you have survived
while generations of fishermen
have come and gone? What do you know?
14.
Each poem I write is a leaf released
from the dying oak of my discontent
to falter away on the fitful winds
of circumstance, to alight somewhere
among dewy mosses and rotted leaves
and crooked old roots where crickets chew
my mordant measures until their chirps
turn sour from indigestion.
*
Read the rest of BJ Omanson’s four-part serial memoir:
- Part I, First Days on the Peninsula
- Part 2, Working in a Shake Mill
- Part 3, A Solitary Winter in the Woods
- Part 4, Rambles with Robert Lee (coming June 5th, 2023)
BJ Omanson’s memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road (2023), was published by Monongahela Books and is available here.
You can also watch BJ read his poem “Closing Inventory” here.
Learn more about BJ on our Contributors’ Page.
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 4: Rambles with Robert Lee by BJ Omanson - June 4, 2023
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 3: A Solitary Winter in the Woods by BJ Omanson - May 22, 2023
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 2: Working in a Shake Mill by BJ Omanson - May 8, 2023