Chapter 4 - Dog with a parachute

I sat in the Seattle library researching dogs. My head swam with setters and blue healers, shepherds, huskies and Burnoose mountain dogs. And when I was ready to just flip a coin, I came upon a hardbound book written in 1965 with a handsome prince-like black dog on the front. The Complete Labrador Retriever it said and it was written with an English countryside formality and had pictures on the back cover of groups of men in foggy fields wearing shooting coats, fedoras and leather gloves, with noble attentive Labrodors waiting at their feet. They looked like winged messengers to me.

I opened it at random and my fate was sealed. For there on page 119 was a black and white photograph of a yellow Labrador retriever in an airplane during the Second World War. He was perched at an open door with a parachute on its back. His master dressed in British army fatigues was steadying the dog to help him get a clear jump. And on this dog’s face, 10,000 feet above some dusty landscape was a face of fearless intent, full to the brim with loyalty and excitement, a readiness to do whatever job it was. The caption described him as a member of the 104^th airborne canine division. I didn’t need to read anything else from the pipe-smoking author about these dogs. Any dog amazing enough to parachute on command was the dog for me. I wanted a retriever, a working dog, someone to go with me into the deep woods of Alaska, a dog to leap into adventures with.

A week later, I was with my friend, Dog Lady in her little yellow Toyota truck with a canopy top and a back end full of horse tending gear, saddle pieces, bits, brushes, and the smell of dry hay.  Dog Lady was a veterinarian assistant, someone who seemed to be more at home with animals than humans, a friend from college days. Country pretty, innocent and slightly shy. She had straw blond hair, magnetic blue eyes and an olive-browned complexion. I had long been attracted to her, but was too afraid to be direct about it.

We drove out of Seattle along some back roads for a while, as the sunlight turned her skin warm and tropical and her soft hair blew in the wind.  I wanted to reach out for her, put my hand on her warm leg, only a foot away—but my gut got tangled up and I had to look out the window at the tall conifers passing by as the sun specked through the limbs.

The guy on the phone had told me there were eleven pups in all, but that he was going to hold on to the pick of the litter for himself.  I didn't even know what pick of the litter meant.  We arrived at a big two-story place with evergreens all around and a large fresh grassy backyard where a great gangly gaggle of Labrador puppies clowned and lounged in the afternoon sun. 

Off to the side in some shade by a tree lay Brandy Pride of Postelwait, the bride of a certified Labrador champion named Nickelodeon.  A group of little vanilla colored pups sucked on her teats, drunk on the warm blood milk. Brandy Pride looked off lazily with a noble bearing like she was Isis, queen mother of the gods.

I wandered around the yard, looking at head size, paw size, brightness of eyes—not really knowing at all what I was doing—but following a checklist I had found in a book under a section called “choosing your Labrador pup.” Dean the owner of these dogs, a middle aged guy of average height and a reserved bearing, made it clear he did not raise dogs for money but rather to keep the strain of Labrador’s in the world clear of poor breeding. He raised labs as a craft and out of love, he told us. Beneath his studied demeanor he emitted hints he was not about to let go one of his prize doggies to some dope.

"She's a beauty," I said nodding toward Brandy Pride.

"She's a fine animal," he said and picked up a red rubber ball. Like an invisible signal through racing through the atmosphere Brandy Pride became instantly alert, eyes peeled onto that red ball.  Dean tossed it over a fence. In a motion that had no beginning and no end Brandy left behind a scatter of sprawling milk sputtering babes and covered the 45 feet in one movement leaping over the four-foot-high fence—her front legs jutted out like Wonder Woman flying and her back legs tucked in like a rabbit’s—clearing the top board by an inch, a portrait of exquisite grace. She nabbed the ball, hopped back over into the yard effortlessly and plopped down to assume her regal pose while hungry little puppy tongues scrambled back towards her languorous nipples.  I looked wistfully at Dog Lady’s silhouette standing beneath a tree and I envied those pups greatly.

I wandered around the yard looking at one puppy to the next. I have heard all the stories how, when a person entered the room, a puppy had come right up to them and they just knew it was their dog—some cosmic connection became immediately apparent. I didn't feel any of that.  But I did notice this one little guy sniffing at my foot and wagging his tail. Most of the other pups were lounging around aimlessly. This one had a real nice head—well proportioned with sunbeams in each eye.  I picked him up. He didn’t lick me in the face like in those cute doggy commercials; he just grunted at the pressure I was exerting on his milk fat little puppy gut. But in his eye I saw the look of a dog parachutist.

I put him down and walked around some more before sauntering over Dean's way.

“I'm from Alaska,” I said trying my best backwoods nonchalance and self-confidence. “I live in the rain forest in Southeast,”

Dean nodded his head but remained silent.

"Good healthy country for a water dog,” I said. Dean nodded. I looked out over his brood of little vanilla drunkards and just stood there with him for a while. 90% of getting something you want is right timing. The other 10% is luck. I stepped over to where my new little friend was, picked him up looked him over with a critical eye. I looked in both his ears, though I had no idea why. I looked under his gums at his teeth. Yep there were teeth there and they were white.

“I’m taking a liking to this one," I told Dean.

Dean let out a little blast of air like an old cowboy would to humor a new wrangler to town. Between a stalk of straw hanging out of his teeth, he said,  "That’s the pick of the litter. That’s the one I’m not going to part with."

A whole bunch of things happened inside me at once in that moment standing in a sunset afternoon grassy yard with a dog under my arm and a reluctant owner six feet away. My heart began beating faster. I felt beginner’s pride that in one chance out of eleven; I had picked out the best of the crop. Though I had been only partially settled on the dog when I picked him up, Dean’s refusal now made me want him more. All of this happened in the space of a tail wag. I had to hold it in beneath an accountant’s inscrutable face and act like it was no big deal.

I put Woody down and walked back slow like to old cowboy Dean.

"Yeah, well I'm kind of attached to him,” I say.  “Big mistake!” the gerbils inside my brain screamed out. Negotiation error number one. I had let out my attachment way too early and with too much energy, too much want.  You gotta be able to walk away. I could see Dean's resolve harden in his face. He sensed the strength of my interest and matched it with his ever more firm resolution to not let go.

"Not that one." He said with finality.

This had the effect of making me absolutely convinced I had to have this one dog, even though there were ten equally fine other pooches meandering around.

"Aw, you have all these others left,” I said easing into a friendlier tone with failed jocularity.

"You have all those others to choose from," countered the old cowboy curtly.

God, now I wanted that dog so much it hurt. Dean’s obstinate refusal made me nearly obsessive. To the outside world, though my face still belied the calm of a country pond, the gerbils were shouting like they were on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I looked back at Queen Isis for a while and then at Dean. He was looking away at the woods beyond his yard.  No opening. Big impasse.

I pulled out a photo of the little red cabin and showed it to Dean. “He'll be living in the best outdoors," I said. "Good Labrador country.” I paused struggling for something more to say. “Lots of ducks," I added weakly.

Dean stood there looking at the photo. He said nothing.  He seemed to be getting impatient. Long moments passed in silence, the warm summer breeze blew pine smells mixed with cut grass and puppy breath.  I wrestled for something else to say but was growing too nervous, the spool of yarn in my gut tangling up. I felt everything in my life teetering on this one moment. I was sure felt Dean was about to tell me to get back on my horse and get outta town.

Enter the angel of providence. From out of the heavens, it seemed to me, came a voice. It came from inside the house through an open screen door. It was a woman’s voice. "Oh for God's sake Dean, let him go." It was Dean’s wife who had been silently surveying the entire negotiations. She emerged from inside to the back porch.  "You got more dogs than you know what to do with."

Dean didn’t say a thing. He didn’t look up at her or acknowledge her presence. He just kept looking at the photograph of the red cabin

"Shut up Ward, Don’t say a thing,” commanded all the gerbils in unison. “Not a word!" I hung on the precipice of the exquisitely tense moment.

Dean looked over to the woods again. He sighed. "Well, I'm going to have to charge you more for that one," he said at last.

"Hmm" I said slowly like this was a bit of a problem for me. I took a deep breath and squinted my eyes a bit and deliberately rubbed my chin. Inside I'm screaming, “Hot diggity dog! Hot diggity fucking yeah!” Right then I felt like I could have run over and really told Dog Lady what I thought about her and kissed her right on her gorgeous lips. 

"How much?” I said slowly and a bit troubled.

"Dean thought for a bit. “Three hundred.”

I looked down like I was thinking this through, but was surer than ever that I really was going to kiss Dog Lady as soon as we got out of there. "Okay" I said, “I can handle that."

We all went inside. Dean’s wife coaxed the last of his grumblenss from him, wine came out in celebration and so did scrapbooks full of dog pictures and pedigree charts. I paid Dean and we parted all smiles and friends. I had to leave the pup for a few more weeks until he was weaned from the Earth Mother’s tit. 

Back in the truck, still parked in the driveway, I was overflowing with joy. I looked over at Dog Lady, She was talking about how wonderful that new little dog was, and how nice those people were.  I couldn't hear a thing. I started to move toward her, my heart pumping out the back of my neck.  At that moment, almost by instinct, she put the truck in reverse and I hesitated. She looked in the side mirror to back out. I went to reach for her hand on the gearshift when a wave of anxiety as big as a tsunami flushed over me. I thought I would faint. The yarn in my abdomen had turned to ropes and had lassoed every muscle in my body. Dog Lady pulled the truck out and we drove away. 

Two weeks later, I returned to Dean's and picked up my new little buddy. Driving away through the country roads I took him out of his box and put him on my lap. He sat there sniffing around, his warm milk smell wafting up to me with the cool air coming in the window, and just then a Woody Guthrie song came on the radio.

As I looked down on this fresh little perfect bundle of bright vanilla soft fur, with the two of us heading out over open road, some feeling came over me like a soft sheet. It felt like the greatest adventure of my life had begun. “Woody,” I said quietly. And felt its sound come from inside me as if it had always belonged there. It moved out in to the afternoon sky as another bird song, something sweet that sang the world into clearer focus and infinite goodness and possibility.

“Woody,” I said again.

Chapter 3 - The Little Red Cabin

The water rocked me gently. I lay alone in the bunk of a houseboat in Ketchikan inside my sleeping bag listening to waves galunk against the hull. I felt safe, maybe for the first time in my life. I felt safe that no one else in the world knew where I was in that moment. There was no one there to feel I had to please, no one there I had to get to like me, no one to give me a grade.

For a month the waves had rocked away the confusion of my Boxtown life. The three-piece suit masquerade, the constant attention to clock-time, to keep myself, “billable.” Away from the force field of a family that felt like strangers. Away from the noise of cars, the passing of jets, the ringing of phones.

I was still accounting, but at least for Alaskan Natives and not boxtowners. I had taken a job as a controller for Cape Fox Corporation, A Tlingit Indian company a few miles south in a little town called Saxman.

The sun had poked its wintry head above Deer Mountain. I pulled on a pair of pants that were as cold as frozen pasta. I crunched over frost sunbacklit on the dock, like shimmering fur, blue, silver and red in the dawn. I fired up the little Volkswagen Rabbit the company had leant me and scraped ice off the windshield with a piece of broken PVC pipe I found next to the dock.

A woman from Saxman had told me about a cabin out north she thought had been abandoned. It sounded intriguing. I drove passed the Mecca tavern and to a dirt road about thirteen miles out of town that dipped and curved down toward the unseen ocean. Around one corner, a dog popped its head out of the bushes. It was a Norwegian elkhound and it appraised me malevolently as I drove by. In a few short months he would be known as the “Devil Dog” and would become Woody’s arch-enemy.

I found the little clearing in the trees the woman told me about and pulled in. I stood a moment listening to the stillness of the waking day. A two-foot wide wooden ramp led steeply down into the dark woods. There were no railings and it was a four to five foot drop on either side. A few remnants of green sandpaper skid pads held in tatters by nails remained on the boards. The ramp was wet, as was everything perpetually in this forest where it rained thirteen feet a year.

I picked my way carefully down. At the bottom of the ramp, I turned and bounced over a series of boards suspended over the mucky ground that ran a narrow path between dark hemlocks.  Each board was tilted a different direction, one to the left, the next to the right, each lower or higher than the next succeeding board.

This maze of boards etching a funky path through these woods would become for five years an obstacle course I learned to walk and even run over sometimes in the pitch dark, by way of something I came to call "foot seeing." This involved a meditative awareness and trust to go forward, keeping my eyes not down, but up and to the trees looking for the subtle gradations of the darkness between the treetops and the sky to steer my feet by.

I walked slowly through the forest and heard the ocean washing through the trees. It stopped me in my tracks. The waves seemed to reach inside to my own internal tidal flow, some mysterious ebbing and flowing that did not know about clocks or spreadsheets. I swayed to the music of it and took perhaps the first deep breath in my life.

I watched the slight breeze jostle the delicate hemlock branches. I allowed my sight to unfocus slightly and see the pattern of many tree limbs bending, bowing, dancing, silent together, endless. Without knowing it at the time I had stumbled upon a practice that would heal me for many years. It had something to do with the dance of every present moment in the wilderness. It was a place without thought, simply a watching of movement, the breathing sounds of the wave’s undulations over the reef.  I was suspended in time.

Some unrest pulled me out of this beauty trance. Around one more bend of trail I could see the sun spilled sparkle of water flash between dark limbs swaying.  I breathed the breeze flowing gently upwards from the sea. Then I saw the cabin, a faded wine red. The roof hung down over the forest like a hat brim pulled down above the outline of a door, like a shadowy eye.

I walked inside and found myself in a rough little kitchen with an oil stove at one side. A rusted out iron-frying pan sat in the sink. I tried the faucet. Nothing. The kitchen was open to the main room, a rectangle about twelve by twenty feet. It was littered with detritus from some beer-canned transient who had been using the place. There was a moldy torn cotton sleeping bag, an old red vinyl recliner chair, and a Leave It to Beaver style 50’s couch gone bad with some raunchy porn magazines strewn about.

It felt slightly dangerous to be there. And yet it was clearly abandoned. The air smelled of slightly rotted wood that had been dried to sweetness by the window sun.  The source of light for the cabin was a lovely picture window like looking through a Nikon viewfinder. Outside the window stood a rickety old porch flecked with faded paint. Rimming the porch were sweet green hemlock, cedar, and spruce limbs. I kept expecting to hear footsteps, to wake up from this dream. 

The cabin sat up twenty feet above the beach, to where a set of crotchety stairs descended. An old unstable picnic table rested in the middle of the porch.  Below, and beyond the trees, waves were peeling across a black rock reef. The sea spread out onto the horizon held down by pale blue distant mountains. In the center of all this water—an intermittent spark, a crack of white lightning.

This was the light that would frame my consciousness, my thoughts, for five years. The lighthouse beam that would take on the proportions of my heart, would settle me with its presence, would frighten me at times as it silently filled the pitch dark of the cabin blazing everything with a Hitchcockian light before sinking me once again into a sea of total blackness.

The little red cabin had found me. Now it was time to get a dog.

Chapter 2 - A Fire on Fourth Avenue

 It was five o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I looked up high as the Seafirst building’s walls receded like train tracks blackly into the sky. In each of its little windows held a person separating the world into numbers and slicing truth into right and wrong.

My face was painted mime white and I wore black jeans, a black t-shirt, a black vest, and white gloves.  In front of me on the sidewalk stood a mannequin dressed in my dark pinstripe wool suit. I drew a large circle in chalk around him. A small crowd began to appear. I carefully buttoned his vest and put a hat on his head. I picked up a child’s small watering can with little flowers on it that I had bought at a toy store and began to sprinkle him. I hoped the smell of gasoline would not carry too far in the breeze.

I lifted up his hat and poured over his head, pulled out his belt buckle and dribbled onto his private parts. A lady in the crowd let out a laughing gawk. I then took a deep bow and deftly flicked a lighter. My friend went up like a Buddhist monk protesting a war. The crowd scattered and screamed and I ran.

I ripped around the corner to Seneca street and across into a small alley. I burned along it in my black Chuck Taylor’s and at the end ran down and jumped into a Chevy station wagon my friend Dewey was driving. I threw myself in the back between the seats and yelled, “Go! Go! Go! as we zipped out. I made him go around the block as I lifted myself up to see out the window, a flaming accountant in front of a big black monolithic boxtown coffin and tore out of that city never looking back.

I shook awake from my combustible daydream on the back deck of the Alaskan State Ferry on its way to Ketchikan. The sun was out and the air clear and buttery. Surrounded by my audit bags, I looked out on tents of people who had camped for the three day ride, many chatting quietly, eating, reading or playing Grateful dead music. A lot of us watched a colorful group of kids playing hacky sack. They were amazing.

I pushed aside my fears of rejection and discomfort and stepped into the circle. One kid kicked the small multi-colored sack a dozen times acrobatically before popping it expertly over to a girl in dreads who kneed it and flicked it with her ankle to a big guy who bounced it off his chest, to his knee and then from one foot to another before careening it to his pal who shot it my way.

I saw it coming, all eyes on me, out of place in my slacks and blue button up shirt. I kicked it with my left foot and watched along with everyone else as it sailed in slow motion over the rail and into the endless ocean of the Inside Passage and sink evermore out of sight. A kid in a rainbow colored t-shirt ran to the rail and moaned pitifully, “No!  That was my special sack. My dad made it for me and I’ve had it five years!” He and his friends looked forlornly into the sea, then walked away from me without a word. “Sorry,” I stammered weakly.

I was on my way to a small Haida village called Kassan to do an audit of their Native Corporation. In boxtown when I first heard that the firm had jobs up in Indian villages in Alaska I raised my hand and said, “Give me every one of those.” The other accountants wanted to stay in the city, to audit banks and manufacturing companies and scoffed at my Alaskan dreams. For me it was simple: a way out of the box.

Deep-forested islands passed by. Mile after mile through the Canadian islands, now and again we passed a lone cabin or a very small village.  I felt I could reach down into the ink-blue sea and scoop up a handful of liquid dark velvet to clothe some handsome young woman in. On some rocks a half dozen seals snoozed. Following along in the wake some Dall porpoises raced and soared. What magical world had I fallen into?

The magic melted as we pulled into the industrial heap called Ketchikan. Its hillsides were tortured and rock and busted machinery lined the waterway. It was coming on late night and I was able to get one of the last rooms near the ferry terminal at the Landing Hotel. I went downstairs to the bar where a roomful of locals were beginning to drink themselves into oblivion. I had the best they had: a three dollar can of Budweiser and ate some grease-covered fish and chips and made it up to my room where I fell eventually into a fitful sleep.

At three in the morning my room was attacked, someone yelling and screaming, a crash of glass. Heart beating like an engine room, I shot up and flicked on the light. The room was empty. Then I heard, “You fucking asshole!!! I hate your fucking guts!” And a crash again of glass. It was a couple in the room next door to me. “Shut up bitch!” A guy roared. “Leave me alone.” And another crash. A slurred argument continued all night from the lovebirds despite me pounding on the wall and I didn’t get a wink more sleep.

In the morning I piled my audit bags into a Cessna 185 floatplane and was soon above the turmoil twelve cylinders rap-a-papping against my headached cranium. Below I could see toy fishing boats, tugs and a small sailboat plying the waters of the Tongass Narrows. I could see over to Gravina Island and the green-grey graveled surface of the airport runway. Between it and Ketchikan ran a small ferry that looked like a floating Birkenstock. A flock of seagulls jumped out of our way and as the engine settled into its cruising speed. I began to relax a bit.

We made our way up the channel toward Clover Passage. Had I known it, if I had looked down, 13 mile north of town was a little abandoned red cabin by the sea where Woody and I would one day live.

We headed north and west out across Clarence Straight. A single fishing boat unzipped the channel with its wake. We then curved a long deep drop into a half moon bay on Prince of Whales Island. The pontoons hissed as we slid along the water and the pilot dropped me off on the end of a long dock. He unloaded my bags and shoved off. The big pistons fired up and soon the plane was thrumming its way like a large hornet into the blue morning. As its drone slid out of earshot, I turned to survey my surroundings. Tall spruce, cedar and hemlock trees ringed the beach. I saw a building here and there but otherwise the place seemed was deserted.

An enormous bald eagle slowly and large-winged wrapped itself across the prehistoric sky. A seal popped its head up and stared at me in my white button down shirt and two audit bags on the dock, then blinked incomprehensively and slipped again into the quiet dark bay.  From somewhere, a raven let off a sound like a giant knocking on a large hollow door, echoing off the trees and the surrounding green hillside.

Something hit me between the eyeballs, something that would not let up for the next fourteen years. It was this: the gourmet air and water of this Alaskan land. An almost preternatural brilliance and clarity of the light. I felt as if I was looking at the world through newfound eyes. Through my nostrils poured the freshest sea cooled air imaginable. Inside, I sensed something I had been seeking all my life: freedom, the freedom of being out here, amidst the raw world beauty and not a building in site. Nothing for an elevator to rise in, only trees and mountains to climb.

From the far side of the bay I spotted movement. A four wheel all terrain vehicle rolled itself along the beach and over a few stray drift logs. It made its way to the dock and putted out to me. A smiling older Indian man with a crew cut said “Hi, I’m Louie. Pile aboard.”

Louie turned out to be the president of the company I had come to audit. I wondered what the boxtowners would say if they could see me then, bounding along on the back of the ATV along a beach, my arms wrapped around the waist of the president of the company.

“You come at a good time,” Louie yelled to me. “There’s a potlatch starting now.” We putted our way along the beach. Louie drove me into the woods past some Bureau of Indian Affairs stick frame homes. A few small kids on bicycles and trikes starred at me as if I were shape shifter, a wolf that Louie had caught in human form.  We passed by a single grey totem pole, with an eagle at its top, a beaver and salmon below it. Nearby was a dilapidated cedar house, built of large planks weathering its ghosts into the day.

We stopped beside a simple rectangular community hall. Outside teenage boys were carrying in big aluminum cooking pots. Some elders dressed in bead vests and beaded headpieces ambled in. I was looked at as an object of curiosity but because I was with Louie I was accepted nonetheless with a harmless aloofness.

I was here to do an audit of these people’s corporation, Kavilco Incorporated. It along with 225 other Indian corporations existed because of oil. Enormous fields had been discovered near Prudhoe Bay. The government was now very interested in Alaska. They wanted to build an 800-mile pipeline from the North Slope to an ice free port in Valdez so it could fuel our oversized cars and trucks.  Smartly the Alaskan Natives, seven distinct tribes overall, blocked the pipeline in court. Suddenly the U.S government was deeply concerned about their moral obligation to settle aboriginal land claims in Alaska.

So Richard Nixon signed into law the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANILCA) whereby Alaska was split into thirteen geographic regions, each assigned a regional corporation and given land and money. Within these thirteen regions, local or village corporations were formed as autonomous organizations. Overnight villagers were made shareholders and the corporations collectively given deed to hundreds of thousands of acres of land and millions of dollars of money. And the oil began to flow.

It was a rare and strange kind of social experiment. Take a people who had historically made decisions collectively marshaled by the matriarchy of each village group, and superimpose a new class of natives called shareholders, onto the village structure. Some of these shareholders became leaders in the corporation and some got a lot more than others. Everyday villagers were handed a piece of paper telling them they owned 100 shares of stock.

In Southeast Alaska, where Kavilco was, the land the corporations were deeded happened to include prime old growth timberlands. Over the course of the next twenty years the vast majority of these lands were logged off to stumps through sales the village corporations made with Asian companies. Ancient old growth trees, the last of the major great stands in America were shipped by the billion board feet as round logs over to Japan, Korea and China.

The village corporations made and mostly squandered huge sums of money in the game and not so coincidentally had to hire white managers, white timber companies, white engineers, white road builders, white lawyers and white accountants to take care of it all. White senators and congressmen made out pretty well too. Eventually a Native elite would rise as corporate officers and they made out pretty well too.

But I didn’t know any of that as I stood the lone white man inside the Kavilco community center this June day, deep in the forest with the nearest automobile a distant island and 50 miles away.  I was surrounded by about 200 Haida and what struck me most was the entirely of the generations there. Grandmothers and grandfathers, teenagers, kids, infants and adults, all mixed in and participating. Long tables were filled with people sitting and eating, many dressed in regalia, sipping pop, juice or coffee. A man up front was talking on and on in Haida and a few people seemed to be listening.

Food tables were laid out with platters and bowls filled with fresh salmon, white rice, seal meat, herring eggs on hemlock branches, blueberries, huckleberries and salmonberries, tired looking salad but also fresh seaweed collected from the nearby rocks, razor clams, limpets and plenty of Indian fry bread, which wasn’t very Indian really but white flour and sugar deep fried in Crisco.

Through the night storytelling, singing and dancing, mostly line dances with dancers dressed under large wool blankets decorated with numerous beads into designs of animals: wolf, beaver, halibut, bear, raven.  Where was I? I felt an old nemesis of mine, a displaced discomfort and aloneness creep into my body.  I did what I usually did, I sought out the dark.

I slipped out of the hall and walked on down the evening trail feeling relieved to be alone and anonymous. I found my way down to the beach. It was a glowing clear summer night. The moon was half full and waning.

The sky was still bright and deep blue even though it was past 10pm. The bay was as still as a Zen monk floating in his orange robes. A golden retriever ambled up and I ran my hands through his coat. He responded like a miner who had struck gold. I sat down on a beach log and pressed my hands along his spine and below his muzzle to the loose skin of his chest and above massaging his neck. I don’t know why, but my hands knew how relax a dog into bliss. He didn’t ask me who I was or what I did. He stayed by my side as if I always belonged with him. It felt good to be with no one but a dog.

Over the horizon I saw a faint glow. Maybe it was the dropped down sun or perhaps the glow of a mannequin in a suit burning on Fourth Avenue six hundred miles away.

Chapter 1-Boxtown

 I drove along the Alaskan Way viaduct below the Seattle skyline—the place I called Boxtown—in my ‘66 Mustang convertible with the top down and the morning sun and sea air. I was free. Until I turned up Seneca Street and the black box of the Seafirst building where I worked loomed above me like a tombstone. As I drove into the cave of the garage beneath the building they called “the box the Space Needle came in” I felt an accustomed jolt hit my solar plexus. Under the artificial and dirty lights of the garage I strapped on my vest, pushed my tie up and put on my wool pin-stripe suit coat. I exhaled and walked toward the elevator.

I was a CPA, a certified public accountant, on my way to another day inside the box. As I rode the elevator to the 27^th floor a familiar slow choking sensation settled in around my neck imprisoned by my buttoned up shirt and tie. The man in front of me in the elevator was twice my age, about 52 and stood facing the door. We did not speak as the little box hurtled us up into space. His neckskin rolled over his collar like a raspberry donut. He jangled the change in his pocket and I could hear his fractured breaths, shallow and quick.

As the door opened to the floor of Ernst and Whinney CPA’s I too felt my breath go shallow. I walked down the rectangular corridors turning right angles to get to my little office with the view of the Smith Tower to the south and the seagulls riding the wind like trapeze artists. Coming down the hallway toward me was Tev Rengstrom. I tried to get my shield up in time to get by him and on to my office

What are you looking at?” came the mocking voice.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

He sneered. Tev Rengstrom was like an Aryan supremacist in a business suit. He was lean with short blond hair and detested anything soft or natural. He wasn’t much older than the younger accountants such as myself, but he took some perverse pleasure in psychologically terrorizing us. He was very good at it. It wasn’t something you wanted to confront him about, that was the very thing he was waiting for; then he could then cut you to pieces with his tongue before you knew what hit you. And for the next few months he would not let up for an instant. Unless of course you went out drinking with him and he deemed you wild enough and tough enough to take it. Some people are just born with a mean streak. And something in me, in spite of his nature, wanted him to like me. I wanted to be on his side, accepted. It was my weakness—wanting everyone to like me, so I could avoid conflict—and he exploited it every chance he could.

“It’s just tough being inside up here on a day like this,” I ventured, trying to act indifferent. 

“Oh and you’re just too good to be in here with the rest of us?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Eat shit,” he said with a smile as we passed.

I heard my name paged over the intercom system. It was Armin McDerdermott, one of the head partners of the firm. I walked into his office, facing West overlooking Elliot Bay. The sun glinted across the water like a stream of diamonds.

“Mr. Serrill,” he said with a kind lilt to his voice. “Sit down, sit down.” Armin was kind. He was a good man. He was the most quintessential accountant I ever met. You got the impression he came out of the womb in a three-piece suit. If Armin ever had a hip thought in his mind his accounting brain would jump on it like an obsessive housecleaner. His wife told me once that he came home one day greatly excited by this little night-light he had found in a catalog. It was attached to a little pad of paper. When Armin woke up in the middle of the night with some accounting solution—how to account for a contingent liability on some company’s long term debt—he could flick on his little night light pad and scribble it down before settling back into some calculated snores for the rest of the night. I’m sure he always slept in his pajamas.

Armin wanted to talk to me about accounting for shipments of inventory in transit for a medical company I was auditing. The issue was how to value a shipment of heart defibrillators that had not reached the company by the end of the year. As I sat in the comfortable chair in front of him, I had to fight back a sleepiness that began to overcome me. Despite the near constant anxiety of a body not made to be in a suit, things conspired to cause an instant drowsiness. The ventilation system around the room hissed with white noise, like a cool flow of water in the distance. The day was bright and clear blue. Armin’s voice was soothing and metronomic. It was all I could do to sit there and respond without completely nodding off. I got up as soon as I could and took the file folder off his desk he wanted me to look at.

Back in the hall a group of four accountants lounged around talking. I stopped in and leaned against the wall to listen in. There was Frank, a good guy with a great sense of humor who played folk guitar, Debbie a woman with a gentle heart, Rachel, one of my supervisors, smart and lovely, who I almost considered a friend and Dave, a guy I graduated from college with, who day by day seemed to grow more callous and buy into the certain kind of mocking humor that pervaded the place. Underlying most of the personal conversation in the box was this motive to be funny; to get other people to laugh, but it always came at someone else’s expense. It was always laughing at people. I remember once when I was in a restaurant and Dave came up behind me grabbed the hamburger on my plate took a big bite out of it and threw it back down laughing like a truck struggling with its gears.

As I stood against the wall the conversation quickly dissolved and a force field seemed to hit the group and disperse them toward their offices like leaves before a wind. It was almost surreal to me, like I was watching some movie where the sound cut out and the figures went into slow motion. I turned to look up the hallway and saw the source of the silent wind. It was Don Slewitt, the new managing partner. The previous partner had been an alcoholic and liked to have a lot of fun. The firm never made any money though and Don had come in to change all of that.

Don walked by with the kind of quiet corporate power only money and authority over other people gives one. I continued to lean against the wall. “Hi Don,” I said. “Hello,” he nodded in a professional and contained way. He seemed to appreciate it that I didn’t flee before him like the others. But as he passed I felt the air behind him falter and go into fetal position.

Back in my office the day’s work was to prepare some financial statements for a large timber company that I had been auditing the past six weeks. Every day I converted the corpses of trees into numbers. This day, like many others, I could not keep my mind on numbers. I kept looking out the window and watching the seagulls, the way they rode the drafts of air high above the city, for no other reason than to fly. One flew close by my window and looked in at me. I saw his black eye rimmed in yellow. He was curious and free. The choked feeling below my neck that had continued to grow since entering the building was now joined with a knot in my midriff. My body wanted out. I felt I was suffocating.

I tried to complete a schedule called a Statement of Changes for the timber company. I was supposed to finish it before the end of the day. It was important to stay “billable” to account for our time so the firm could charge clients ten times what they paid us to do the work. A feeling of panic rose—like a thousand ants had let loose inside me. I heard Armin McDermott call me again over the intercom. Before I knew it I was walking fast down the main hallway out by the elevators to get to the bathroom.

I was relieved no one else was in there. I went immediately into a stall, closed the door and sat down. I blew my breath out and tore the tie from my neck. I sat in there for twenty minutes. I heard the door open from time to time, dark brown or black wingtips walk by, belts tingle, fabric on skin, a few explosions of coffee shits in the stall next to me. I didn’t move. It was something I did often in Boxtown, naked with my anxiety, sitting on the throne. The bathroom stall was a kind of sanctuary for me. It was the one place in the building I felt safe. It was the one place I knew no one else could find me.

That night back home on the small wooden desk in the kitchen I noticed my housemate Grabin had put out some water colors and some large pieces of paper with the logo of a chemical company along the bottom. I found myself sitting down with Jethro Tull music turned up loud and covering this paper with colors. I drew a series of dark brown and black office buildings in the left and center rising to the middle of the page. On the roof of each glowed red warning lights to keep airplanes from crashing into them. To me they served a deeper warning. Those red lights become malevolent eyes looking at me daring me to come closer. And then in one frenzy of color and madness, I drew along the upper right side and towering over the buildings an abundant green forest hillside. And from the top of this plateau of green and lovely life I painted a thunderous waterfall that cascaded down toward Boxtown threatening to obliterate it back to the nature from which it stole itself.

And for some reason I did not understand for many years, almost as an afterthought, I drew two figures at the top of this waterfall looking down on it all. One was a stick figure of a man and at his side this yellow cartoon dog.