A Walk in the Woods

victim clinging to a square of floating wreckage on rough seas, or possibly someone who
had been lifted unexpectedly into the sky on top of a weather balloon he was preparing to
hoist--in any case, someone holding on for dear life in dangerous circumstances. I
grabbed my pillow and climbed up alongside him to ask why he didn't just take the
bottom bunk.
His face was wild and flushed; I'm not even sure he recognized me at that moment.
"Because heat rises, buddy," he said, "and when I get up here--if I fucking ever do--I'm
going to be toast." I nodded (there was seldom any point in trying to reason with Katz
when he was puffed out and fixated) and used the opportunity to switch pillows on him.
Eventually, when it became unsustainably pathetic to watch, three of us pushed him
home. He flopped heavily and with an alarming crack of wood--which panicked the poor,
quiet man in the bunk underneath--and announced he had no intention of leaving this
spot until the snows had melted and spring had come to the mountains. Then he turned
his back and went to sleep.
I trudged through the snow to the shower block for the pleasure of dancing through ice
water, then went to the general store and hung out by the stove with half a dozen others.
There was nothing else to do. I ate two bowls of chili--the house specialty--and listened to
the general conversation. This mostly involved Buddy and Jensine bitching about the
previous day's customers, but it was nice to hear some voices other than Katz's.
"You shoulda seen 'em," Jensine said with distaste, picking a fleck of tobacco off her
tongue. "Didn't say 'please,' didn't say 'thank you.' Not like you guys. You guys are a
breath of fresh air in comparison, believe me. And they made a complete pigpen of the
bunkhouse, didn't they, Buddy?" She passed the baton to Buddy.
"Took me an hour to clean it this morning," he said grimly, which surprised me because
the bunkhouse didn't look as if it had been cleaned this century. "There were puddles all
over the floor and somebody, I don't know who, left a filthy old flannel shirt, which was
just disgusting. And they burned all the firewood. Three days' worth of firewood I took
down there yesterday, and they burned every stick of it."
"We were real glad to see 'em go," said Jensine. "Real glad. Not like you guys. You
guys are a breath of fresh air, believe me." Then she went off to answer a ringing phone.
I was sitting next to one of the three kids from Rutgers whom we had been running
into off and on since the second day. They had a cabin now but had been in the
bunkhouse the night before. He leaned over and in a whisper said: "She said the same
thing yesterday about the people the day before. She'll be saying the same thing
tomorrow about us. Do you know, there were fifteen of us in the bunkhouse last night."
"Fifteen?" I repeated, in a tone of wonder. It was intolerable enough with twelve.
"Where on earth did the extra three sleep?"
"On the floor--and they were still charged eleven bucks for it. How's your chili?"
I looked at it as if I hadn't thought about it, as in fact I hadn't. "Pretty terrible,
actually."
He nodded. "Wait till you've been eating it for two days."
When I left to walk back to the bunkhouse, it was still snowing, but peacefully. Katz
was awake and up on one elbow, smoking a bummed cigarette and asking people to pass
things up to him-- scissors, a bandanna, matches--as the need arose and to take them
away again as he finished with them. Three people stood at the window watching the