Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/30

RV 22 (BIG SUR22) Meanwhile by the way and however, every day is cold and cloudy, or damp, not cold in the eastern sense, and every night is absolutely fog: no stars whatever to be seen—But this too turns out to be a marvelous circumstance as I find out later, it’s the “damp season” and the other dwellers (weekenders) of the canyon dont come out on weekends, I'm absolutely alone for weeks on end (because later in August when the sun conquered the fog suddenly I was amazed to hear laughing and scratching all up and down the valley which had been mine only mine, and when I tried to go to the beach to squat and write there were whole families having outings, some of them younger people who'd simply parked their cars up on the high bridge bluff and climbed down) (some of them in fact gangs of yelling hoodlums)—So the rainforest summer fog was grand and besides when the sun prevailed in August a horrible development took place, huge blasts of frightening gale-like wind came pouring into the canyon making all the trees roar with a really frightening intensity that sometimes built up to a booming war of trees that shook the cabin and woke you up—And was in fact one of the things that contributed to my mad fit.

But the most marvelous day of all when I completely forgot who I was where I was or the time of day just with my pants rolled up above my knees wading in the creek rearranging the rocks and some of the snags so that the water where I stooped (near the sandy shore) to get jugfuls would, instead of just sluggishly passing by shallow over mud, with bugs in it, now come rushing in a pure gurgly clear stream and deep too—I dug into the white sand and arranged underground rocks so now I could stick a jug in there and tilt the opening to the stream and it would fill up instantly with clear rushing unstagnated bugless drinking water—Making a mill race, is what it’s called—And because now the water rushed so fast and deep right by the sandy stooping place I had to build a kind of seawall of rocks against that rush so that the shore would not be silted away by the race—Doing that, fortifying the out-