Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/23

Rh Mien Mo valley"—But the fire crackles, the patch gets sewn, the creek gurgles and thumps outside—A creek having so many voices it's amazing, from the kettledrum basin deep bumpbumps to the little gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks, sudden choruses of other singers and voices from the log dam, dibble dabble all night long and all day long the voices of the creek amusing me so much at first but in the later horror of that madness night becoming the babble and rave of evil angels in my head—So not minding the bat or the rip finally, ending up cant sleep because too awake now and it's 3 A.M. so the fire I stoke and I settle down and read the entire Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde novel in the wonderful little handsized leather book left there by smart Monsanto who also must've read it with wide eyes on a night like that—Ending the last elegant sentences at dawn, time to get up and fetch water from gurgly creek and start breakfast of pancakes and syrup—And saying to myself “So why fret when something goes wrong like your sleepingbag breaking in the night, use self reliance”—"Screw the bats” I add.

Marvelous opening moment in fact of the first afternoon I'm left alone in the cabin and I make my first meal, wash my first dishes, nap, and wake up to hear the rapturous ring of silence or Heaven even within and throughout the gurgle of the creek—When you say AM ALONE and the cabin is suddenly home only because you made one meal and washed your firstmeal dishes—Then nightfall, the religious vestal lighting of the beautiful kerosene lamp after careful washing of the mantle in the creek and careful drying with toilet paper, which spoils it by specking it so you again wash it in the creek and this time just let the mantle drip dry in the sun, the late afternoon sun that disappears so quickly behind those giant high steep canyon walls —Nightfall, the kerosene lamp casts a glow in the cabin, I go out and pick some ferns like the ferns of the Lankavatara Scripture, those hairnet ferns; “Look sirs, a beautiful hairnet!”—Late afternoon fog pours in over the canyon walls, sweep, cover the sun, it gets cold,