Hot Mountain
By Matt Gleeson
It’s sad that Nestor Groome remains one of the most unsung and invisible poets of the whole loosely affiliated cloud that gets called the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. He was somehow forgotten, and none of the recent exhumation and hero-worship has uncovered him yet. He didn’t spew out quantities of writing, just pressed forth a few drops here and there—a poem or two in various small magazines during the late 1950s, and a single collection in 1965 called Hot Mountain Poems. What he did write is steeped in nature and wilderness, classical Eastern literature, and Buddhist thought. His poems are at least as good as those of his more famous Beat comrades, and like those comrades, his life cut a path against the flow of mainstream America. As the one-sentence biographical note in Wild Offerings, the long out-of-print anthology of nature poetry in which I first encountered Nestor Groome during my high school days, puts it, he was “a Buddhist, a political radical, a naturalist, and a pioneer of the back-to-the-land movement in California who sadly disappeared in 1966, under perilous circumstances, before he could see that movement truly blossom.” Whether or not he perceived himself as belonging to any coherent movement, he was part of a very specific strain of the counterculture—those people who were homesteading before the explosion of communes in 1968 and immersing themselves in Eastern culture while it was still foreign to most of America. He’s akin to Gary Snyder, but with a voice entirely his own, that has the flavor of the untamed fool, the innocent outsider to society, or the tricksy mountain sage. While he’s obviously well-read in Buddhist literature, Nestor Groome doesn’t reference it so much as he seems to have absorbed it into the roots of his character. What do I mean? Reading his poems has always made me feel like a free man, because they make pain and loneliness just as visible as joy, while treating all of these conditions as if they were simply different types of terrain to walk on.
The Hot Mountain poems themselves (a suite of short poems from 1963 that gives the larger collection its name) are sketches of life on the homestead and in the surrounding forest that exemplify this voice. As the name suggests, they play off of the Cold Mountain poems of Han-shan, and on the surface their style is just as deceptively simple and understated. On the other hand Groome could unleash messier works like “My Pelt,” a long, strange, libidinous fantasia about renouncing civilization for the woodlands, which culminates in a joyful dream of cohabitation with a female bear whose ursine ways happen to naturally be something close to meditative enlightenment. When I first read it, I thought it might be the most out-there piece of poetry I’d ever seen. But in my opinion, if Nestor Groome has one keystone poem, it’s probably the late piece “Unculture,” which begins:
I love what sprouts unbidden
In soil I never turned,
The forms I’d never think to call to life.
“My Pelt” may have lit me up with its weird pyrotechnics, but it’s the less flashy and more chiseled “Unculture” that has swollen with meaning over the years. Those first lines sum up for me exactly what Nestor Groome finds in the world around him and transmits in his writing.
For years this is what I knew about the unfairly obscure poet Nestor Groome. It was an English Literature professor of mine at Berkeley who clued me into another dimension to his story. Chatting in this professor’s office about a paper I was writing, I was excited to find out that he liked Groome, because I came across so few people who had even heard of the man. During some twist of our conversation, I commented, “Well, white writers tend to romanticize the East, but Nestor Groome makes it feel native.”
I remember my professor looked at me quizzically. I realized I had misspoken somehow.
“I guess that’s a bit of a blanket statement,” I amended. “Maybe it’s not true of all white writers.”
“You do know that Nestor Groome was black, don’t you?” said my professor.
“Oh,” I said.
After this I didn’t know what to say. It struck me that I had never made the effort to research his biography, and all I felt was embarrassment. The professor smiled at me and said, “That changes things for you, doesn’t it?”
I hated to admit that it did. Nothing changed about why I loved his work, but what I thought of as my relationship with Nestor Groome went through a total recalibration, because my mental image of him had been so absurdly wrong. I often experience the illusion that I personally know a writer—which isn’t completely unreasonable, since writers display something of their inner selves on the page. But could there be a more cutting way to puncture that illusion? I began to research Nestor Groome in the libraries, and of course my professor was right.
I imagine that for many readers it doesn’t make sense at first to think of Nestor Groome as black. His verse on the page passes for white all the time. I’m not the only one to be fooled—apparently contemporaries like Philip Whalen and even Amiri Baraka were surprised the first time they met Groome. But I think it would be unfair to speculate that he was trying to fool people or to assimilate, because in every other way he never showed the slightest desire to conform to the system—his life was too marginal and his voice was too idiosyncratic. This voice just naturally strikes people as white, which poses a bit of a problem.
The obvious reason is that Nestor Groome’s own skin color and race are one big lacuna in his work, never once mentioned. Racially motivated inequality is one type of suffering he ignores completely: not a word about Jim Crow, slavery, or bigotry. Nestor Groome never references the vibrant black culture so important to the Harlem Renaissance, nor does he even use the rhythms of black speech that so many white Beats dipped into. It’s hard to name a single other black writer who doesn’t at some point proclaim himself or herself to be such, either blatantly or implicitly. And why not? Blackness is something worth owning, and also hard to disown. This failure to proclaim his birth-culture is less surprising in a nature poet, whose default subject matter isn’t people—but then, Nestor Groome’s status as a Buddhist-influenced nature poet is another perplexing thing. Of course African-American authors can and do write nature poetry, but how many devote themselves exclusively to it and make this their literary identity? As a genre in the West, it seems undeniably Caucasian. Maybe it’s because black people in America have rarely had the luxury of turning their attention aside from the effects of human relationships. Maybe it’s the explicable but simplistic association of African-Americans with urban life, with enclaves in the big cities that amassed during the Great Migration, when the countryside represented Jim Crow and the city represented advancement. In any case, Nestor Groome makes for an unusual figure, especially when you consider that he was active during the most intense period of the Civil Rights Movement.
A handful of scholarly books deal with Nestor Groome in passing, but other than this you have to dig into manuscript collections from the time, like the Philip Whalen papers or the California Communes collection, both in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Groome was born in 1929 to middle-class black parents in Los Angeles, who moved to San Francisco’s Fillmore District while he was still a child. Interestingly, he never appeared as a creative figure associated with the African-American cultural ferment of the Fillmore—instead, he shows up in the milieux of the white Beats. In the early 1950s he attended a few of the seminal salons held at Kenneth Rexroth’s home, and Groome apparently admired the trailblazing older poet. He took a class on Buddhism at Berkeley at the same time as Gary Snyder, which, surprisingly, seems to be their only personal connection. Later, near the unforeseen and early end of his life, he attended one or two of Alan Watts’s houseboat seminars in Sausalito, and had the distinction of once arguing Watts to a standstill, something he apparently did through gentleness and lack of insistence rather than verbal force. He was a member of an enigmatic group or club called the Spirit Benevolent Association that briefly included Philip Whalen in its ranks. Despite the Beats’ open-minded tendencies and their embracing of forms of black culture like jazz, Nestor Groome must have stood out in all of these settings. He did remain peripheral to most of them. Alan Watts describes him as having “an aloof smile, like he already knew what you were talking about but didn’t mind hearing it again.”
Groome shows up in these fertile settings and then he disappears without hanging around for long, as if he were fundamentally averse to being associated with any movement or group other than his own solitary self. The real attachment he was making in the meantime was to the California wilderness. From 1948 to 1950 he worked for the Forest Service in Stanislaus County, and throughout the ’50s he seems to have left San Francisco frequently for extended trips to the Sierra Nevada or Big Sur. He returned often to the Fillmore and must have had good friends there, but starting in the late 1950s one of his closest friends was a fellow student of Buddhism, a Caucasian named Bardo Bruce. Bardo was a young enthusiast of Eastern culture living on a family fortune made in tire manufacturing, and he had already funded several trips for himself to China and Japan. He and Nestor Groome made several backcountry camping trips together, and in 1961 the two of them hatched a plan that resulted in Bardo buying 20 acres of land in Trinity County and founding a homesteading community called Hard Hope Ranch. Groome lived there for several years. It seems to have been a forerunner of 1968’s communes, not quite as drenched in free love and psychedelic exploration as they were, but still looser and more liberated than the more pragmatic homesteads it drew inspiration from. In 1965 Hard Hope Ranch disbanded when Bardo, who was sole owner of the land, decided to sell it. By then Nestor Groome had left, possibly up to a year previously—perhaps to pursue the publication of Hot Mountain Poems, perhaps for other reasons. The last year or two of his life are sketchy, but it’s certain that he disappeared in October of 1966. He had gone alone on a backcountry trip in Kings Canyon; a fierce storm rolled in that caused advisories to be issued for all campers, and Nestor Groome never emerged from the mountains. You might expect such a dramatic and mysterious end to inflate into a legend, but instead Nestor Groome lapsed into total obscurity.
Hard Hope Ranch is long gone, but to see one form into which this particular lifestyle has ripened you can head to the Yuba River watershed—Gary Snyder territory—another important locus of the California back-to-the-land movement. Rural life has been fertilized with countercultural ideas: the commonest work seems to be either art or agriculture of varying dubiousness, the costume for a swim in the river (and many other things) is nudity, the loving is free and independent, psychedelics aren’t hard to find, and neither is a meditation center. It would be easy to call it a hippie paradise, although you can dip a little below the surface and find plenty of anguish and sheer uncomfortable weirdness, which is probably true anywhere there are humans. I spent a few weeks in the area visiting an old college friend, and noticed that it’s also an excruciatingly white society. I’m afraid I didn’t add much melanin to the mix, but after knowing Oakland and San Francisco I was clobbered over the head by the obviousness of the homogeneity there. In Arcata, in Big Sur, in photos of the hippie communes—other California societies that strike me as akin—you see a similar homogeneity. I don’t think it’s wrong to suggest that this same heritage has also contributed to the complex counterculture of Burning Man today—a gathering of 50,000 people devoted to “radical inclusion” where dark skin is something exotic. I admire these places and feel comfortable in them, but something doesn’t add up for me in the ways they’ve been portrayed and explained. The histories I’ve heard appeal to culturally universal notions, like open-mindedness, liberty, love of nature, peace and love, do-it-yourself impetus, escape from industrial capitalism. I’ve never heard these places defined as settings born of a specifically white subculture, the way hip-hop began as a specifically black subculture. But they must actually be quite culturally specific, because regardless of the welcome extended in theory, it has to mean something that for the most part black people simply aren’t there participating. I can’t help thinking that these countercultural paradises must seem either off-putting or simply irrelevant to people of color.
For Nestor Groome, who was an anomaly in his own world, and who lived and died in an era before the Civil Rights Movement had won many of its major battles, it must have been difficult. Yet nothing of this difficulty makes it into his poems. Did he really manage to transcend these hardships with confidence? Or is he one of those people whose wise exterior helps bury his subterranean troubles far below expression, who doesn’t know how to talk about what’s closest to him? His public voice feels strong and true, but how deep does it actually go? Really, I just don’t know.
Maybe he finished milking the two nanny goats, sitting on a creaking stool in the little straw-strewn shed, enjoying the regular spurting sound that grew gradually less tinny as the pail filled, and brought the pail into the big house. In the kitchen he ran into Bardo, who asked if he wanted to drive the truck into town together. Nestor drank a slug of red wine from an open bottle, handed it to Bardo, and said sure, although he didn’t like going into town.
They rattled down the dirt roads and onto pavement. Bardo was a fiercely bearded man with a woodcutter’s build, even more muscular than Nestor, yet he tended to drive the truck with an unexpectedly and comically careful posture, always gripping the wheel with both hands, and Nestor thought that if he ever got truly mad at Bardo, all he’d have to do was watch the man drive and all would be forgiven. Bardo’s immediate motivation for wanting Nestor’s company seemed to be that he was steamed up about something, and he didn’t take long to bring it up. “What do you think about Gregory’s friend James?” he asked pointedly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nestor. “It sounds like you think something.”
“Well, he’s been visiting for two weeks now and I don’t think I’ve seen him do a lick of work to help out. How long do you think he’s planning on staying?” Bardo made him out to be an anomaly. But plenty of people drifted through Hard Hope, some of them close friends and some of them more tenuous connections, and James was no lazier than most. Nestor thought Bardo must dislike him for some other unspoken reason. James was a young blond kid with buck teeth who drank heroically and wanted to be a Hollywood actor.
After Bardo had complained about this particular guest’s or interloper’s faults for a while, Nestor said, “Mister Bodhisattva, you’ve got to stick around until everyone else is enlightened.” It was a common joke between the two of them, but Bardo said, “What the hell does that even mean? I’m not going anywhere. I’m living in my home, and this kid can leave if he can’t pull his shit together. How come you let people walk all over you, Nestor?”
The slight excess of scolding his friend seemed to help Bardo get over his anger by the time they reached town, and they bought a few tools and a sack of flour in the general store. Two young boys were crouched in one aisle looking at a cricket on the linoleum. The littler boy was unsteadily holding a hammer with a price tag still on it in both hands over the insect, while the slightly bigger boy, as if coaching him, said, “You have to get it in the abdomen. That’s what the big part’s called.” Nestor laughed to himself. They left the store, and another errand or two passed without any mishaps. On the way out of town Bardo stopped at the area’s only filling station to fuel up the truck. The filling station had a water fountain around the side of the building, where the asphalt lot turned back into pine trees, and Nestor walked around for a drink while Bardo watched the serviceman fill the tank. He drank deeply, slurping once just for the pleasure of it, and when he stood up and wiped his woolly beard with the back of his arm there was a woman standing there, with a bouffant piled on her skull and a sundress on, holding a little girl by the wrist. As soon as she caught Nestor’s eye, the woman jerked the girl’s arm as if angry at her and said loudly, “Come on. You’re not using that water fountain now.” Fortunately Bardo was ready to go at this point, and they left the filling station right away, but the incident bothered Nestor during the entire ride home. This was why he disliked coming to town. He felt like he could hardly bear to sit still in the bench seat of the truck, yet he didn’t tell Bardo what had happened. He wasn’t entirely sure why, although it certainly had to do with something Bardo had said a couple of years ago when the two of them were camping in Yosemite National Park. Sitting by the smoky fire outside their little canvas tent, drunk on whiskey under the stars, describing what was good about their friendship, Bardo had said, “You know something I like about you, Nestor? You’re not one of those people who always complains about being insulted by bigots.” This single comment years previous didn’t mean that Bardo wouldn’t be sympathetic now; moreover, the observation was true. But he wasn’t the one Nestor wanted to confide in. Nestor knew that many of the other homesteaders were looked at askance in town too, more for their rumored licentiousness and un-Christian ways (although Bardo didn’t have that problem; he could fit in with a bar full of lumberjacks in Gold Rush country, despite his blue-blood background). But me, he thought, I’m an outsider’s outsider, aren’t I? Improbably, that thought cheered him up. Back at the homestead he took another big long pull on the wine, with his finger hooked through the little glass handle by its mouth, and Bardo said to him, “Nestor, how could you ever give up civilization? What would you do without all the wine it produces?”
“Who ever said I’m giving up civilization?” said Nestor. He went to the well and drew a large bucket of water and brought this to the kitchen. Then he chopped firewood for half an hour. After this he walked to his cabin and sat on a stump outside it. Manatee Jones and Carly were pulling weeds in the rows of beets, low to the ground in wide-brimmed hats under the sun, moving along together like the carriage of a very slow typewriter. Their conversation drifted over to him as faint scraps of sound. A scrub jay hopped across a pine branch and screeched for no particular reason. He heard metallic swiping sounds from the kitchen building and a voice, probably Gregory’s, cooing, “Look at you, you’re a nice sharp blade now, aren’t you?” Looking back to the beet field, he could see clearly that Carly was topless, and with a peaceful sense of enjoyment and plenitude he watched her tanned breasts swing as she leaned forward and worked her forearms. Then Manatee Jones (whose real name was John) reached over and touched one of her breasts with the back of his knuckle. Carly sat up straight, looked down, and started laughing. Noticing that Nestor was watching them, Manatee J0nes held his hand up with its palm facing his chest, and called over, “Look what I found on Carly’s nipple!” Nothing was visible at this distance, so Nestor called back, “What is it?”
“It’s an inchworm! A very smart little inchworm!” said Manatee.
They went back to weeding, Nestor brought out a notebook and pencil from his cabin to write a few idle lines that weren’t intended to add up to much, and in this pleasant way the late afternoon passed, with a few clouds piling up overhead and the tone of the summer light deepening into richer orange shades.
Dinner was vegetables sautéed by Gregory in the restaurant-capacity wok bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and bread baked by Wanda, dense and a little sticky because it hadn’t quite risen properly, and of course plenty of inexpensive wine. When they sat down on the rugs and tatami mats around the floor-level table, Diane, who was sitting to Nestor’s left, laid her hand on his forearm and said, “Nestor, our very own writer, how about you say us some grace?” She was a born Iowan who at age twenty-five already had deep laugh creases at the corners of her eyes, a voluptuousness that seemed meant to feed whole litters of babies, and indispensable knowledge about the functional details of homestead life, for she’d grown up spending her summers on an aunt and uncle’s farm. She was physically affectionate with Nestor, but he noticed she often had few words to say to him, which she made up for by praising or even fetishizing his status as their household poet. “Okay,” Nestor obliged, and raised his hands in blessing. “Mister Groome, Mister Groome, / Hand us the broom. / You have to sweep you every day / To keep the dust away. Amen and namaste.” Everyone laughed. They used their mouths half for eating and half for friendly chatter while it grew dark outside. Nestor observed that Carly and Manatee’s fingers were still black with soil in every crease. Manatee Jones was a skinny, long-haired carpenter with a sad tilt to his eyes, and Carly was his short, freckled girlfriend, a talented seamstress. Nestor loved observing the way that whatever one of them did, the other did too, even down to not washing their hands together. He found it moving and thought they’d make a splendid old couple, if they got that far. Soon Bardo built a fire in the potbellied stove, and the seven homesteaders plus their visitor James relaxed into a scattered sprawl on the floor-cushions; a new jug of wine was opened, everyone’s heads grew thick and warm with drinking it, and Nestor and Bardo began speculating
about obtaining a mess of grapes from some farm down in Mendocino or Sonoma so as to start making their own wine. James started doing a Cary Grant imitation and Bardo looked ready to sock him. Then at some point Diane, who always became very earnest and heartfelt when she was tipsy, said, “I’m amazed at what a home we’ve got here. Out there, society is pretty fucked up, you can work your whole life without any sense of human connection. But look at us, we’re a family at this point, aren’t we?”
“The family that hoes together!” agreed Manatee.
“And . . . let me put it this way,” said Diane with a mischievous grin. “Let’s just say that the way we do things around here, if I ever had a baby, I’m not so sure I could tell you whose it would be.”
“It’s not mine,” said Wanda, and everyone laughed.
“The way we do things? You mean the way you do things,” said Manatee.
“But I just wanted to say that I’m okay with that,” finished Diane. “I mean, if an accident happened. I like the idea of never knowing whose. Why do we need to make distinctions between each other when we’ve already found home? I’m drunk right now but I mean it.”
Oh my, Nestor thought. He suspected that Diane viewed herself as a gift that she enjoyed giving to as many people as possible. And she couldn’t possibly have forgotten or failed to consider the fact that she had handed herself to Nestor several times. It was no secret. The first time it had happened, they had simply dropped their tools in the middle of hoeing beans and walked to Nestor’s cabin by common consent. Diane was warm and generous in bed. He remembered her sweet weight on top of him, where she insisted on being, so that she could lean down and offer herself from above, like a big heavy hanging bunch of ripe and nourishing grapes. Remember that, Diane? he thought. So why are you speaking to everyone in the room but me?
Diane’s brown eye and Wanda’s blue eye and Bardo’s hazel eye met Nestor’s directly, but no one said anything. He stroked his beard with agitation. It was like there was a bear in the kitchen, sitting on a stool, drinking their milk straight from the pail, and everyone just walked past it pretending it wasn’t there. Why, if they were indeed all family, could no one say, “But Diane, what if your baby’s black?” This blockage happened all the time. It might be Nestor walking up on Wanda and Gregory as they compared their sunburned arms, and their sudden discomfort that reminded him ludicrously of two rich kids caught bragging about their new shoes by a poor kid. Or it might be the exaggeratedly polite questions everyone would pose if Nestor talked about growing up in the Fillmore, as if they were inquiring about an extraterrestrial culture and not sure how to avoid giving offense. In the very beginning he’d heard some congratulatory talk about their homestead being an “integrated society,” but that was all—they seemed eager to trumpet brotherhood, but too embarrassed to acknowledge the simplest differences. Perhaps he shouldn’t complain, because no one in this insular community had ever once called him a nigger or treated him as subhuman or come out in favor of segregation, but it was as if they were so scared of doing wrong and so damn unfamiliar with black people that they didn’t know what to do to acknowledge the issue that one person among them was indeed of African descent.
People, you’re turning me into a ghost, he thought. Maybe he was turning himself into a ghost. Sometimes the pressure built up until Nestor’s skin crawled, but he never said anything. When he considered it right now, a clear vision came to mind that his inner self shied away from and refused to look at directly—an image of Diane’s eyes crinkling in a beautiful, easy smile as she said in response, “Oh, I guess I just didn’t think of it. I don’t really think of you as a Negro.”
Most of the time Diane had used her diaphragm with him, except once or twice when she decided it was a safe part of her cycle, and he assumed she did this with everyone. Now an awful thought chilled him: What if she only uses it with me? This was sheer paranoia. He told himself that logically it couldn’t be so, or she’d be pregnant already and not just speculating about an accident. This was how crazy he was getting inside.
Diane’s speech had long passed and Bardo had steeped some green tea that was handed around in tiny handleless cups; the conversation splintered into many as they sipped the hot liquid. Manatee was enthusiastically recounting a Native American legend about little people who lived atop Mount Shasta. Eventually Bardo asked, “Nestor, my quiet friend, what wise things are going on inside your head right now?”
“Not much at all,” said Nestor. “A whole lot of silence. I think I’m going to go take a walk in the forest.” Bardo nodded with approval. Nestor was drunk already, but he opened a new standard-size bottle of wine for himself and walked out of the building with it. He picked his way past the goat pen and the chicken coop, from which came low flutterings and throaty squawks, and set off up the dirt track that threaded into the woods. In peace he crunched along without a light, smelling pine needles and sap, with the trees looming on both sides and blackly blocking the starlight from above. He gulped wine from the bottle in his fist. The path grew steeper and passed through stands of twisted manzanita that he could barely see in the dark. He stumbled over roots and stones with his drunken feet.
He searched and palpated his own heart for the feeling of home, and couldn’t find it anywhere. I have exiled myself, he thought. Maybe it’s a mistake to be here, he thought. I’m not one of you, he thought to the homestead somewhere below him. I’m not one of you either, he thought in the vague direction of Fillmore Street. All that chanting and shit! he thought, remembering the words his old friend Randall used to ridicule the Buddhism he didn’t know shit about. Planting shit in fields, he thought, it’s so limited, it belongs to the realm of human planning. That’s a good phrase, he thought. I’d rather be surprised by nature, he thought, and I’d rather eat nettles and dandelion greens. I helped start this place, he thought, but I just wanted to live close to nature. I don’t want to lay Diane, he thought, I want to lay the mountains! It’s fun to be drunk in the forest at night by yourself, he thought. He stopped to piss in a bush, and swayed so much on his feet in the dark that he nearly fell over. He zipped up. He remembered a recent newspaper photo of four black men sitting at a white lunch counter in North Carolina, looking at the camera with an air of merely humoring a small distraction from a much more grim and significant task. Is this the sit-in right now? he thought. Or am I copping out? he thought. I’m not very good, he thought, at thinking about these things. This is all so deep under wraps that I don’t even know where to find it, he thought. Life is suffering, he thought. Diane, I have some relevant information, he thought. He visualized himself as an old man, an old black man with a matted white beard like the locks on a sheep’s chest, laughing uproariously. That’s the kind of old man I want to be, he thought, I’m going to be the old man of the mountains. I seem to have misplaced my wine, he thought, flexing his empty hand. A heavy whirring passed close overhead and nearly startled him into falling again, and something warm and wet sprinkled him. When he inspected the back of his hand he saw dark drops. A round shadow hooted on a lightly swaying branch overhead, and he realized that an owl had flown over him with prey in its claws. At the base of the tree, something small and white shone. It was the tiny skull of a shrew or vole. On his knees now he looked about him and realized that the pine duff under the tree was littered with dozens of owl pellets, small grey twists of lint everywhere, all of them living beings that had been squeezed into lifeless capsules of fur. He picked one up and broke the slimy little packet with his thumbs and pulled fragile bones from it. It was beautiful, something he would never have thought to make had he invented the world. We all get crushed into pellets in the end by the big owl, he thought. I think I’ll sleep up here in my mountain home, he thought. He lay down among the pellets and closed his eyes. But it was too cold. I left my peacoat at home, he thought. By the time he got back there everyone was asleep. In the dark kitchen someone had hung up a cheesecloth full of goat milk to drip.
Or maybe you can still find Nestor Groome up there in the mountains behind Kings Canyon and ask him yourself. I was two days out from the trailhead, and had clambered up piles of talus above the last stunted junipers into a land of granite. I camped by a cold unnamed lakelet set in a gentle jumble of granite slabs and patches of tough green grass, above a drainage and below a mountain pass. Pure rock crags rose up on all sides, slowly falling apart, the snow beneath them filthy with rockfall. As dusk began to grow in that chilly, silent place, I was walking back to my camp from the far side of the lake and saw a sheltered overhang of rock, with a large pile of stones beneath it, and sticking out from between the lowest stones there was a scrap of thick navy blue felt. I slept in the open, in my down sleeping bag under the stars, and in the middle of the night I was woken by the clear crackling rumble of a boulder tumbling down a cliff on the far side of the drainage. The rockfaces around me were lit brightly by the moon, and it seemed that at this late secret hour the landscape was at its most wakeful. I sat up, and around the side of the lake from the direction of the overhang came walking the ghost of Nestor Groome, barrel-chested and bearded. Nestor, I said, so this is where you are.
That’s right, he said, here I am in Hot Mountain! My friend, I found Hot Mountain.
What do you mean? I asked, and Nestor laughed and said, There is no trail to Hot Mountain, man. If you walk to Hot Mountain, you’ll never get there. If you make it to Hot Mountain, you’ll never get back no matter how much walking you do. Once you find Hot Mountain, you’ll realize you’ve been there for a while. Let me tell you how it started. There were seven of us, and as soon as Bardo bought the land the first thing we did was get a well dug, which was a real bitch, and then we threw together some little cabins out of pine boards so we had places to sleep, and an outhouse so we had a place to shit, and once we had these we built the big house. That’s where we had our kitchen, that’s where our big potbellied stove lived, that’s where we hung up Bardo’s Chinese screen painting of cloud-covered mountains. This took us two full seasons, and there were times when it was just Manatee and myself working at it, shirts off and sweating in the sun. Good thing we had Manatee. He taught me so much that after we completed the big house I went off and applied my learnings to the meditation cabin. All eight could sit zazen in there at once if we wanted; I stained and finished the wood and set tatami mats in the floor and placed the windows with thoughts of natural light and you couldn’t see a single nail or screw anywhere once it was done. But it wasn’t all easy. During that first winter none of us had ever been snowed in in such isolation and with so few amenities, not even me during my time with the Forest Service. We had to use some of Bardo’s funds to buy food. During one blizzard Diane became very sick while we were already getting scared about running out of firewood. I remember so much fear and frustration in enclosed spaces that at one point Bardo socked Gregory in the jaw, and then immediately ran to find a cloth for the blood, repeating, “Aw, shit, man, I’m sorry. Oh shit, I’m sorry.” Then he hugged me, saying the same thing over and over. Bardo had steam in his veins sometimes, and once he told me that was why he meditated, because regular practice provided him with ventilation. It also wasn’t easy when early on Carly got the news that her dad had died in an automobile crash. She had some kind of intense bond with her father that I never fully fathomed, and even with Manatee there she thought about killing herself once he was gone. She didn’t tell us so, but Manatee did, during their darkest period.
But, said the ghost of Nestor Groome, that’s how things go on Hot Mountain. The trail to Hot Mountain is overgrown, although really there is no trail. I could have been there on Hot Mountain forever without getting to Hot Mountain, you know? We lived by the seasons there, frozen and scared by the winter, thawing in the spring, and stripping nude in the summer. We woke up with the sun, though it was less often that we retired when the sun did. When the growing season began in the April after our first winter, we planted vegetables. It was poor agricultural land and the soil needed lots of amendment, but we subsisted. The vegetables might not have made it without Diane’s care. I remember all those rows of seedbeds like an empty orphanage, and Diane in dirt-soiled Levis every day surveying them. Diane also got the chicken coop going. She would stand there imitating the various warbles and clucks of the hens, and before she cracked an egg in the skillet she would first hold it to her nose and sniff deeply and sigh, as if to say, “See, now weren’t chickens a good idea?” I was the one who insisted on the goats, although it was Diane I consulted about husbandry whenever the books I read left questions unanswered. I love the playful way goats will butt you with their hard skulls, I enjoy their strange sideways pupils, and their milk, drunk on the first day when it’s still sweet and not yet goaty, is far better than cow’s milk. “There’s sweeter,” Diane said once. “Someone just knock me up, and you’ll see, I’ll nurse you all, even Manatee, and you won’t need goats anymore!” Can you believe it? Every now and then she could say some bizarre, daring thing like that that would throw you for a loop. But anyway, this was our life, devoted to making things and working with our hands together. Many of us had never quite lived this way before, but our aim was to buy as little of what we needed as possible. A couple of times Manatee hired out his services in town for some cash, or Bardo offered a bit for the common good, but we tried to stick to the plan of self-sufficiency when we could. I remember that even when Carly taught Gregory to sew, and he spent night after night working on a pair of corduroy pants for himself, with his tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth in deep concentration, hissing every time he pricked his fingertip with a pin, and somehow the end result came out as baggy as a pair of clown pants, they were still better than store-bought pants and he wore them every day for months until they wore out. When you didn’t have to work for anyone but yourself, you could throw yourself more fully into your work, and there was just more time to enjoy all the other things that everyone ought to enjoy. I sat zazen almost every morning in the meditation cabin. I had plenty of time to write, and to walk in the forest far beyond where the parcels of private property
ended, and to sit around drinking tea or wine or both. I never got started on junk the way a lot of cats I knew in the city did, and I wasn’t much into reefer, but I love my red wine and my tea. Give me the clarity of tea and the mists of wine. The other important thing we found we had ample leisure for was simply talking to each other, with no rush and no pressure to extract information. Sometimes we had so much leisure that we had nothing to say to each other, and over time this bred a closeness of rare depth between us. It was a higher life we were aiming for, though not everyone saw it that way. “Backwards to the land”—that’s what I remember Randall from the Fillmore saying just before I left: “So you’re going backwards to the land, huh? Now that we’ve got a toehold in the city?”
But the tighter you grip your map to Hot Mountain, said the ghost of Nestor Groome, the harder it gets to find your way there. As we settled into that year after our first winter and before our second, interesting things began occurring between us, in such brand new territory and such close quarters. First of all, Diane made love with every member of the homestead, including the women. She said she’d been strongly affected by Emma Goldman’s opinions on love, and Diane was a force that no sane human would reject from their bed. It may sound strange, but I think we were all brought closer by our sexual excitement over Diane. It was clear from the start that no one would own her. After some point there seemed to be few rules. I remember that Wanda and I used to screw. She was thirty but looked almost like a child, small-framed and spritelike, with curly red hair and shockingly pale skin. Her skin looked so vulnerable that if she went topless in the sun I felt worried that her little breasts would singe or melt away like butter. Despite her childlike appearance she had a sexual appetite. She admitted to me that if she didn’t get it fairly regularly, she started to feel depressed and unloved. In the city she had been monogamous for exactly that reason, and clutched at relationships after they’d gone rotten, because she thought it was sordid to take care of her needs with strangers and didn’t trust herself when the craving got too bad. There was no need for her to get depressed where we lived—I was her main source, and maybe Bardo too sometimes. She and I did plenty of lying around naked, and our contrasting skins looked so fine together in the sunlight that I think we both felt more attractive for it. Wanda confided a lot of things in me. She had grown up in Alabama, and one morning as we were slowly waking up together in my cabin, she told me, “You know, when I was little, I thought that Negroes were devils. Actual demonic beings. I didn’t see many of them, but when I did I was scared. Isn’t that disturbing? That someone could really think such a thing just because people told her so when she was very young? It’s strange to think that was me, it really bothers me.” She said it just like that, clean and simple, but who knows how many times she had weighed it in her mind before daring to tell me. Who knows what dream had brought it to mind just then. At first it made me squirm to hear this, but then Wanda put her head on my chest and squeezed me, and I understood how glad she was to tell me this. I’m pretty sure that it was the first time she had ever confessed this to a black person before. And so our ways of loving knit us together too. But don’t think that the love was entirely easy either. Especially for poor Gregory. Perhaps he felt spurred into competition by Diane. It’s true that he was a man who always seemed anxious to impress, out of some deep loneliness. Whatever the cause, tiny slight-framed Gregory coaxed Bardo into bed, and I don’t know precisely what happened, but afterwards it didn’t seem to sit right with Gregory. He insisted angrily that he wasn’t a homosexual and refused to talk to Bardo for a while. And then Gregory began to feel like the man left out of our odd-numbered set, and he got so gruff and strange that I’m sure he would have left entirely if Carly’s friend Susan hadn’t moved in late in the fall. No, it wasn’t easy. And yet I tell you I’ve never felt so close to a group of human beings in my life.
Do you see what I’m saying about Hot Mountain? asked the ghost of Nestor Groome. The wind blows through pines on Hot Mountain. Early summer on Hot Mountain, boletes push up through the duff to take a peek around. On Hot Mountain, the scrub jays are speaking nonsense. A bear track in the mud on Hot Mountain—someone going somewhere. On Hot Mountain, the stream running its tried courses in the crannies of rock occasionally leaps out like a little shiny tongue into a new one. On Hot Mountain, seven bodies are tangled together and seven minds are moving separately. Unculture, my friend, you’ve got to have unculture! That’s what you do on Hot Mountain instead of agriculture. Unculture means not trying too hard to grow the things you want. Unculture means you don’t worry about putting your thumbprint on things. With unculture you just let things be what they are. I used to think that was the difference between the mountains and the fields, but the great secret of unculture is that you can perform it even while you’re performing agriculture. Crazy! I could practice unculture every day, because Bardo telling a story about a Zen temple in Japan while I’d rather be sitting and thinking quietly is unculture. Watching a squirrel fuck up and accidentally drop its acorn from a high branch is unculture. Little cute squashes and bulging deformed squashes growing side by side are unculture. People in the Fillmore thinking I’m insane to move to the backcountry with a bunch of white folks is unculture, but a black man who finds his only spiritual ancestry in East Asia is unculture too. Diane’s faint mustache that she secretly shaved and Gregory’s drinking binges and Wanda’s secret nightmares are unculture. And look at you, my friend, your nose is running while you sit here in the cold listening to me. If that’s not unculture, I don’t know what is. But maybe I don’t know. I’m no bodhisattva, I just came back because I love the ten thousand things!
Nestor Groome’s ghost stopped talking, though he continued to sit quietly on a nearby slab of rock. The mountain pass above me, corniced in with a rim of snow, glowed white with moonlight, and I could see that my sleeping bag was encased in a thin sheath of ice. I wiped my nose with my hand, discovering that a stream of mucus was indeed running all the way down my cold lips and into my beard. That’s how Nestor told me it was. Maybe so, maybe that’s how it was.