the fool on the hill (part 6)

In between my trips to see Virgil I had driven the dirt road out to the I-17. Ostensibly to resupply but also to put some distance between myself and the stark, haunted world that he occupied.

Next to the freeway I found myself in the town of Spring Valley. It was everything Cleator was not: new, neatly ordered and lifeless. Gone was Bloody Basin Lane. Instead, in the front lawns of the plastic-looking condominiums garden gnomes of sombreroed Mexicans rode plaster horses along streets called Meadow Lane and Peach Tree Road. The wild west reduced to kitsch.

I drove the freeway south 40 minutes to a strip mall where I spent the night in the parking lot of a Walmart. The supermarket chain allows camper vans to stay overnight for free on its premises.

I stayed up late reading a book called “You Can’t Win.” It is the memoir of an ex-con, Jack Black, and recalls his life as a hobo riding the rails. It is a rare firsthand account of the underbelly of early 20th century America filled with opium dens and pool parlours, cat burglars and safe houses.

Outside a gale blew hard pushing shopping carts over the tarmac and making the camper sway.

My presence there was an overcorrection, a thirst for the bright lights of the city after the somber vigil of candlelit nights in the desert. Looking out of the camper’s rear window the large neon Walmart sign was oddly comforting, something to zone out to.

In the store itself I was garroted by light. Neat pyramids of fruit sat on islands of freshness and overhead plasma screens showed Walmart TV on a loop.

In one of our conversations Virgil had told me about a winter he had spent trapped on the mountain after the December snows had not cleared. It was mid-February before the thaw came. In the meantime it got cold and as the weeks stretched out, wood for the burner grew scarce.

Outside the snow had lain in slabs across the corrugated roof and the guttering, hanging loose on loops of wire, was clogged with ice so that only a thin drip of water found its way through the cut-up oil can into the tank.

In the Walmart restrooms I found a document on the ledge over the urinal claiming that the world was under the control of the Evil One. It said that all true religion is personal and complained that mankind was a victim of his own “Image-ination.”

In the store an alarm beeped obnoxiously as I leaned on my trolley in front of some sports bras, trying to decide if I needed batteries. Walking around Walmart, looking at the world in boxes, I imagined Virgil shivering in his cabin in the predawn. The narrow scoop of canyon must have felt like an animal trap he had fallen into that winter.

Pushing his barrow he searched for the broken off branches of dwarf Juniper and Pinyon Pine and, on the way, collected the miniature baskets of bird’s nests, dusty and fibrous like the pipe tobacco he shaped into cigarettes using squares cut from his journal.

He made a path through the snow up the bank out on to the ridge to where the billycan, eaten by rust, swung in the dawn wind. And there he waited.

In an introduction William Burroughs’ wrote for “You Can’t Win,” the Beat writer lamented the passing of a world where life was cheap but where a man could clamber aboard a freight train in the dead of night and in the axle grease and coal dust taste what it meant to be in the Land of the Free. Burroughs asked the question: would the hobo author have been better off spending his life at some full-time job? He immediately decided not.

“He has recorded a chapter of specifically American life that is now gone forever. Where are the hobo jungles, the hop joints, the old rod-ridding yeggs?…As another thief, Francois Villon, said, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?””

Virgil too still believed in that romantic vision of the old west. His fear of going back to what had replaced it – the strip malls and condos of a nation consumed on image — was the reason he stayed on the mountain. This, and a concern that he might drink himself to death faced with too much society. “I love life,” he said to me more than once, his face fierce with candour.

As I paid for my AA batteries I thought of him at the billycan, watching the faint gnat of light of a car on the freeway some twenty miles to the east, heading back to “stinking civilisation.” I saw him crouched low, an arm slung round his shins, waiting for the first sunrays to hit his dirty and cracked face and for the ground to grow out of the darkness.

the fool on the hill (part 5)

The last time I saw Virgil we drank beer by the billycan. It was a warm March day full of promise.

Below the ridge the ground fell steeply away until it reached the dusty track that led to Cleator after a series of switch backs. The track replaced the railroad that was ripped up in the war to make armaments. Further along from us another path barely visible cut a diagonal down the hillside through the scrub and loose rock.

He had cut this path for the cowboys, he said, who still ran their cattle this way to market at the end of summer.

The cowboys — red-faced old timers who alternated between riding horses and quad bikes — paid him five dollars an hour but he would probably have done it for free, he loved the work so much. It had taken him two years of hacking and digging to finish the thing and he had followed the route of the old cart road from Alexandria.

He knew the layout of the old town intimately and on his porch there was an old photo of the Peck Mine from the turn of the century.

Listening to him I saw again the powerful connection he maintained with this disappeared world and I felt I had him figured out wrong. I had viewed him as an exile from life, as someone frozen in time, unable to shake off the painful memories of his absent family and yet equally incapable of moving on.

Yet seeing him this way betrayed how little I really understood about the reality of his life up here. In some sense, his solitude had allowed him to live outside of time. The need to move forward, to progress, to make plans. He did not feel this imperative and to tell him that he should was not just patronising, it ignored the simple beauty of his existence here. It was like the old joke about the rich tourist who goes up to the juice seller on the beach and starts to lecture him on how he can grow his business, and that with some hard work he might be able to pay some staff a few years down the line and, who knows, then he could take some time off for himself. Meanwhile the juice seller lays on his hammock casually scrutinising the mad man.

Aside from the concessions of the gas tank and a small FM radio Virgil had left modern life completely. He went down off the mountain only a few times a year, usually straying no further than Cleator.

Up here he wandered around the canyon finding the detritus of old Alexandria — the mouth organ combs, the vintage soda cans — and it helped to evoke that old world, just as the hysterical outpourings from the radio no doubt made the contemporary one seem more hostile and remote.

Nearby some animal tracks were pressed into the thin dry dirt. They were too large for a pack rat; maybe they belonged to a bobcat he said. I wondered if he ever got scared up here alone.

He knew he was vulnerable but he tried not to think about it too much. “Ya can burn yourself up thinking. It’s the same with that metaphysics junk. I prefer to keep my feet on the ground, live a day at a time. I mean ya don’t see a dog sitting around taking itself serious an’ shit.

“I can’t handle your civilization. All those responsibilities.” (He gave a weary wave of the arm.) “When my wife kicked me out I let her have everything. I walked away with nothing. I didn’t care. I was like that woodpecker nested in the cactus; only I lived in a crack in the sidewalk. You know I saw that lil’ muthafucka fight off a hawk one day. Kept coming back at him till the hawk got sick of it and flew away.”

His children would be in their forties; did he ever think of trying to find them I asked.

“That’s what you’d do I suppose,” he said. “Not me.”

I wanted to press him on it but he cut me off. He returned instead to the subject of the woodpecker. He asked me if I knew how it was that the bird knew where to look for grubs.

“I used to wonder about that,” he went on. “One day I was watching this muthafucka and he’d keep looking off to the side like he was watching out for something. Then I figured it out: He had his head turned to listen for grubs scratching under the bark.

“I guess there’s smart people who know that ‘cos they read it or seen it in a documentary. But how many of ’em learnt it ‘cos they seen it with their eyes?”

The day was ending and the sun had already dipped below the Bradshaw Mountains to the west, the bumps and curves of their dusty grey silhouettes like two lovers laid down to sleep.

the fool on the hill (part 4)

Walking down the mountain in the late afternoon the green and brown of the hills seemed subdued as if the brilliance had been extracted along with the silver.

At the rock shop I stepped up on the decking and in to the room with the rock samples. On the wall a magazine pullout of a young country music star in a Stetson and vest top was tapped to the wood. Around his face and chest the image burst apart, projecting thin shafts of light across the room. I went closer and saw the light emanated from bullet holes.

I had no idea if Virgil was responsible but I could see how the preening cowboy could easily become an object for target practice after a few cans of Budweiser.

The rock shop was where he had lived with his father when the old man found him on the streets. His father had been hard to get along with but he had set him on his feet again when he needed it. They lived together for two years until one day they began a liquor binge that went on four days straight until the old man’s heart packed in and he dropped down dead.

The door hinge creaked in the wind and on a desk warped with age the pages of a wrinkled magazine flapped up.

The whip crack of a gun reverberating around that curve of hillside must have been an exhilarating release from the silence, like a whale surfacing into an Atlantic squall.

It had not always been so quiet here. A century ago when this was still the Copper State, the hills resounded to the thud of dynamite explosions and the peel of church bells. Pioneers rushed here in the thousands, and when the seams thinned and the price of precious metals dropped they were gone.

On the margins of this American paradigm of boom and bust there were hermits. They were called desert rats and their stories illuminated the area like the sparkle of gold dust on a creek bed. A local historian told me about them, their names could have been plucked from the pages of the Wild West stories in Virgil’s cabin. There was Injun’ Joe and Walking Sam, who would hike two hundred miles to Phoenix and back in the clothes he stood up in. There was Kelly Painter, who met each morning pissing naked off his porch, had twenty thousand in silver hidden in the floorboards and one boiling summer day decided to call it a day with a bullet to the head.

That night back in Cleator I lay on top of the camper gazing up as a ceiling of stars pressed down on me. A shooting star, a streak of incandescent orange, cut a line through Orion.

Below me I heard a porch door open and saw a shaft of light empty into the darkness. A figure emerged with a dog. A TV was on inside and the noise of a male voice backed by dramatic music followed the figure out into the night, sounding tiny and inconsequential in the spread of desert and sky.

the fool on the hill (part 3)

I saw Virgil a few more times over the coming weeks. I pieced together what I could of his story but he was a difficult subject, evasive and frequently drunk.

It was a tale filled with loss and though he occasionally cut a rather wretched figure, he bristled at the thought of being an object of pity.

When he told me how he had watched his father drink himself to death, for example, he paused before adding roughly: “Big fucking deal.

He had known two lives. They were as distinct from each other as day and night though in his childhood they found some convergence. He grew up in a working class neighbourhood of Phoenix, the eldest of six brothers, the son of a truck driver of German descent and a Cherokee woman.

Growing up he cut his forearms to ribbons knife-fighting with Mexican gangs and at fourteen he left school, working as a bus boy and as a dishwasher. At eighteen marriage reformed him and he found a job making parts for America’s burgeoning space programme. Much of it was classified, which meant he found himself working with materials he had never seen before to make parts whose purpose he could only guess at.

While his work was shrouded in secrecy, a healthy glow of respectability illuminated his personal life. He had a son and daughter, cars and dogs and gave up his weekends to teach English to native children on the Apache lands near the New Mexico border. At the Phoenix opera he watched Carmen three times during a summer run in the seventies. He joined a Buddhist sect, voted for Jimmy Carter, attended PTA meetings — “the whole bullshit.”

At the height of the Reagan years this first life ended. His wife kicked him out and his children disowned him and he returned once more to the burning asphalt of the desert city.

He would not say what had caused this rupture though he denied it was his drinking. Nevertheless on the streets he stayed drunk for two years. He was pissed on, kicked, cut and robbed and, in and out of jail, his earlier life took on the qualities of a dream.

It was his father who found him, broken and destitute, and throwing his bag in the back of his pickup brought him to live with him at the Swastika, where the old man was caretaker. Up here he was comforted by the hard, cold truths of the desert, and the uniform indifference of nature.

It was 27 years since he had seen his children. Like the rotten teeth he had yanked out with a set of pliers, the passing of the years had dulled the pain but bequeathed him an absence.

—————————–

Sometimes I had concerns about my presence in his life and the emotional outbursts I provoked in him. The simple fact of someone shining a light on a private world that had been so complete for so long made for some strange encounters.

Once I asked him about a set of straw hats arranged in the shape of a diamond on the wall in the next room. Why did I want to know, he demanded, his eyelids heavy and his voice breaking. He said the hats belonged to the owner of the mine, an old lady in her nineties confined to a retirement home in Texas and as the tears dripped to the floor I wondered if he was crying over the old lady or because I was the first person to ever ask him about them.

Another time I arrived and found the place empty. I crossed the yard past a broken chicken coop that had a sign on it that read “guesthouse”. On a slanted table blackened pots and pans were half full with snowmelt to supplement the rainfall that collected in the water tank on the side of the cabin. The cabin itself looked dark and ominous silhouetted by the sun, while behind it on the canyon lip a stack of boulders suggested a clawed hand.

I stepped up on to the verandah. Along its length a fine wire mesh kept out flies and lower down a tabletop was covered with detritus. On the wall three deer skulls, the antlers still in tact, were nailed to the wood. Laying by the door a six-foot gas canister fed a fridge on the porch and a rusted cooker just inside.

On the stretch of table I noticed the piles of rubbish were actually comprised of an incredible array of curios and specimens. Vintage soda cans, a collection of mouth organ combs, a petrified cork ball, rocks, minerals, bird’s nests, a bat in a jar, and in a bigger jar beside it preserved in alcohol, the bleached head of a Mojave rattlesnake.

I heard a thud come from inside the house. The awareness I was not alone caught me off guard and I waited a moment before calling his name. Virgil emerged through the door, his head drooped and his shoulders hunched.

He saw me looking at the snake’s head. It was a Green Mojave, he said, one of the most dangerous of the rattlers because the toxins in its venom attacked the brain and body at the same time.

“I killed the muthafucka with a spade,” he said.

On the table in his room a jar of peanut butter had a knife jammed into it and on the floor by the bed laid an empty liquor bottle. He looked at me fiercely.

“Ya wanna hear summit I figured out…philosophically? Whose the richest man in the world?”

I said that it was a Mexican property tycoon, according to a list I had seen recently in Forbes’ Magazine.

“I got three bucks, I’m a peasant king. But here’s what I figured out. Take that wetback (his term for Mexicans); he couldn’t buy what I have. You know why? ‘Cos I spent twenty years of my life to get it. I spent it.” He spat the word out and he cracked the table with his fist emphatically.

I thought about the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, whose only possessions were a cloak, a wallet and a staff. Plato was said to have referred to Diogenes as “Socrates gone mad” and the earlier philosopher’s indifference to popular opinion was transformed in Diogenes to total shamelessness. He spat in rich men’s faces, masturbated in public and rallied against the distorted values of a world where works of art sold for exorbitant prices and flour for pennies.

Virgil shared this iconoclasm although his distrust of modernity was as much about fear as any kind of righteous indignation. He had read a lot and he felt this set him apart — “Mesopotamia! Now you use that word in Cleator and they’ll brand ya,” he said once. But he only trusted history books written before the Second World War and for his imaginative life he relied on pulp histories of the Wild West with names like “The Rustlers of Pecos County” and “The Wham Paymaster Robbery of 1889” that lay scattered about the cabin.

His politics, meanwhile, had grown bullet hard and weighted with paranoia in the thin mountain air. In a discussion about American foreign policy he suddenly erupted, upsetting beer cans and thrusting a finger in my face. He became grotesque, a cartoon hillbilly stamping his feet and hurling gobfuls of spit into the grate.

“THEY WANNA KILL YA,” he screamed. “WHY?…BECAUSE YOU’RE WHITE!”

I shouted at him to calm down and he did — so quickly that it was unnerving. He leaned forward and raised his hand and my body tensed instinctively, expecting a fist.

I made a quick summation of the situation. I was twice his size and half his age so if he went for me I could wrap my arms around his shoulders and pull him to the floor. But I had never been in a fight my whole adult life and I was not confident.

In the event he only shook his head and said: “You’re naive. I used to think like you too but at a certain point you gotta face reality.”

the fool on the hill (part 2)

He squinted trying to make out who it was. The beard was shorter than in the photo and he wore a grey pullover that hung limp over his sleight frame. A few seconds passed and I walked up to him and introduced myself. His winced as if expecting a shock.

He wanted to know if I had brought beer, his voice mellow but with a rip at the back from smoking. When I said I had, he said “Well Goddam it!” And that he knew he liked me from the moment he saw me.

His cabin was a mile further on at the old Peck Mine, he said. We walked along a ridge with views east across mesas to the mountains. He talked excitedly, pulling me to a stop from time to time and gripping my forearms emphatically. He drank Bud and tossed the empty cans into the undergrowth.

He usually stayed away from the turnoff, he said. He had gone there with a squirrel he caught, and he tapped the side of the packing crate meaningfully. It was disturbing the birds and he had taken it to the other side of the mountain to release it. To be sure he would recognise it he had daubed it with paint, and if it came back he was going to kill the bastard.

The path curved left below the ridge till we reached the cabin. It was one of only two buildings left over from the old mining town of Alexandria that had existed here a century ago, back when a silver dollar was more than a collector’s item. The other was the rock shop I had been at which was part of the old Swastika mine. He used to live there till he got sick of the hikers.

His cabin sat within a canyon the shape of a cupped hand. In his room dusty light streamed in through a window milky with dirt. At its centre a wood burner was flanked by a narrow iron bed and a small table that stood by the window. Virgil crouched down, feeding chopped wood into the burner.

He had no explanation for why he was here, he said. Or how he had managed to survive the last two decades drinking rainwater, eating the meagre accumulation of what he could scavenge and borrow.

This was home so far as he had one. When the weather was good he was hardly here. In a few weeks he would head up the mountain and set up camp among blazing yellow handfuls of Mexican lilies and the swelled paws of prickly pears that rose side by side as if the inferno of the summer to come were no more than a fable.

Up there was the real solitude he said. The cabin was just a base.

I told him about a woman I met in Cleator, who had said to me she thought he was more free than anyone she knew. He shrugged. He said he could care less what others thought.

His life sounded romantic but it was edged with hardship and it showed in his features, in his sunken cheeks and in his skin coloured burnt ochre and lined like a satellite image of the canyons.

“I didn’t come here to prove a point,” he said. “I don’t do this to be unique. Besides unique’s just a polite word for weirdo. Most those folks’ve never seen me sober. No joke. I’m the village idiot.”

It was true. When people came to visit or bring him supplies he would run them off the place if they forgot beer. Alcohol was his prerequisite for dealing with the outside world. His drunken antics were the stuff of legend in Cleator where he seemed to delight in offending the sensibilities of what he called “stinking civilization”. Dave told me he had kicked him out of the Bar more than once. Virgil was unapologetic. “I like pinching girl’s butts; I’m kind of primitive.”

He was silent a while gazing out at the canyon. The room was warm and particles of dust glittered in the late afternoon sunlight obscuring an ink drawing of a Native American on horseback slaying a buffalo.

“Ya know I was hearing’ ’bout that Condeleeza Rice for years on the radio before I found out she was black,” he said at last, a look of puzzlement  on his face.

the fool on the hill (part 1)

The following describes some encounters with Virgil, a 60-year-old former aeronautics parts maker who has lived alone by an old silver mine in central Arizona the last two decades.

The hills and canyons of central Arizona do not yield. Spotted with low trees, rock and cacti the land here is bare. Ridges studded with sandstone boulders cut the skyline and the Saguaro cactus like alien antennae sprouts its tumescent branches, a cinematic shorthand for the American desert.

A night in late winter I sat in the Cleator bar beneath the hollow light of a television talking to the barman.

Cleator was a handful of tin-roofed cabins an hour’s meandering drive west from Interstate-17  along a dirt track called Bloody Basin Lane. It was dark when I got there and I might have missed the place altogether had it not been for the supernatural glow of the television coming from the bar’s open doorway.

The barman was watching a show called “Lost” when I walked in. He was about to shut up for the night. A cane lay on the bar and when he got up he walked unsteadily returning with a lace of beaded sweat across his forehead.

He set a beer before me and pointed to a place on the label where it boasted that the ingredients were all natural. “Don’t forget: Arsenic’s natural,” he said deadpan. His voice was rasping and distant as if the words were being muffled inside his thick, broad neck.

After we had talked a while the barman, whose names was Dave, showed me a photo. It was inside a cast iron frame and the surface was thick with dust.

I smoothed away the dust with my coat sleeve. Were someone to have asked me to draw how a man who lived alone on an Arizona hilltop would look, I might have come up with an approximation of the man in the photo. He was small — “no more ‘an 100lbs drippin’ wet” — had a long mustard and white beard, and in his hand he held the pelt of a snake towards the camera.

Virgil had lived alone 20 years caretaking an old silver mine, Dave said. He came to town a couple of times a year sleeping rough by the side of the road or in the shadow of the conch-shaped granite boulder that marked the way up to the mine. Dave said he was a cantankerous old bastard and when he drank he got lewd.

“Take ‘im beer if you’re goin’ up there,” Dave said, his white face implacable in the half-light. “And if he don’t like ya, he’ll soon let ya know.”

I parked my camper on wasteland overlooking the town by the rotted remains of Saguaro and a caravan that stood with its windows punched out and surrounded by its own detritus. Next morning the high desert was bathed in velvety winter sunlight, the ground painted olive and vine brown and the distant hills pale violet. Beside this Cleator was unkempt, a cock-eyed slice of Americana ingloriously falling apart. Streaks of rust banded the rooftops and beside the James R. Cleator General Store, ‘Bar’ was painted red on a white signboard.

After breakfast I went to the mine to find Virgil. It was about two miles from the road at the end of a steep rutted track. A wood cabin stood by the track above an embankment packed with excavated rock and behind the shack the front half of a rusted truck sat at a tilt in front of a mine entrance, its bodywork riddled with bullet holes.

A pool of lime green water was at the mine head and a few yards within a hand-painted sign read ‘Bad Air.’ Spent shotgun cartridges, bottles and beer cans lay strewn around but there was no sign of the hermit.

The next day I returned to the mine. At the turnoff I parked the camper in the shade of the granite rock, which was known locally as Pee Rock because it had become a convenient stop-off for drivers who needed to relieve themselves.

At the mine the wind kicked up dust and rocked the cabin door back and forth on its hinges. A sign outside read ‘Rock Shop’ with a painted arrow pointing inside where I could see core samples of mine rock cut in to smooth marble tubes and rowed in boxes.

Beyond the cabin the track looped up behind the mine and I decided to follow it since it was still early and I had nothing else to do. As I walked I watched the ground, worried about rattlesnakes since this was the time they began to emerge from hibernation, lusty and irascible as they looked for a mate. The track mounted a hill then dipped and curved to the right. Up ahead there was a fork in the road. Nearing it I saw a shadow of something cross a Juniper by the roadside. I walked on a little till I could see along the path that led to my right.

A man stood in profile holding a wheelbarrow. In the barrow a packed crate was turned upside down. Sensing my presence the man turned to face me.