Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

30. birds of a feather

Smelt-nibbled, duck-dotted, rain-swept, and muse-blessed, La Conner, Washington, is a collection of frontier north-to-Alaska false-fronted stores (interiorly gentrified but externally little changed since the 1890s); most of which are perched over water on pilings, the buildings looking a bit rickety and forlorn in the mist, yet echoing a certain boldness of spirit they seem to share with the gulls that attend them the way bees buzz about a hive. If La Conner sounds like a fishing village, that’s what it used to be — before the Army Corps of Engineers (infamous for turning proud wild rivers into industrial ditches) dredged the Swinomish Slough; before it was discovered that salmon and civilization don’t mix.

Hemmed in by estuary water (a cocktail composed of equal parts fresh Skagit River and salty Puget Sound), an Indian reservation, and vast acreage of alluvial farmland so juicy rich you can almost hear it gurgling like the tummy of an overfed infant, La Conner is nevertheless expansive in other, less tangible ways. Amidst the marsh grass and driftwood, the cattails and silt beds (the campus of the Academy of Mud), it’s not overly fanciful here to think of blue herons wading in paint jars or poets throwing blackberries at the moon.

Morris Graves was the first artist to settle in La Conner. It was 1937 and Graves was more than a decade away from art-world stardom. He was, in fact, so poor at the time that he lived in a burned-out house, the charred floors of which he’d covered with sand, raking it to resemble the sand gardens of the famous Zen temple in Kyoto. Bearded, gaunt, birdlike, he walked around town with a length of old rope holding up his pants, an intense but benevolent flame in his eyes. People didn’t know what to make of him at first. Unfamiliar with the term “bohemian,” and as “beatnik” and “hippie” hadn’t been coined yet, some locals — desperate for a category, a label — decided he must be a Nazi spy. It wasn’t long, however, before Graves (imbued with an almost supernatural presence) won them over.

Single-handedly, Morris Graves raised the consciousness of La Conner, paving the way for other artists (a few themselves on the long road to fame), art lovers, and the usual hangers-on to settle here. Beautiful, peaceful, private, and inexpensive, it became also, thanks to Graves’s pioneering, that rarity: a small rural community welcoming to strangers, culturally hip, tolerant of eccentric dress and eccentric behavior. In little La Conner, you could — and can — be yourself to the fullest extent of yourself, a freedom you normally would have to go to a large city to enjoy.

There was yet another feature attractive to impecunious creative types. Or maybe just to me. Immediately to the east of town were seemingly endless fields of vegetables: cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, and beets, grown not for the fresh produce markets but for seed, and thus left unharvested for conveniently long periods of time. Convenient, that is, for Terrie and me, who regularly would embark on midnight produce raids. Having quit the P-I to concentrate exclusively on my second novel, I’d become, by circumstance, unfamiliar to the cashiers at Thrifty Foods and Safeway. Our pillage, while not really putting a dent in any farmer’s crop, provided needed nourishment and even a taste of romantic adventure, the ever-present risk of apprehension offset by the almost surreal beauty of the fields, where long rows upon rows of cabbage, rotund and silvery in the moonlight, suggested the marbles in a game of Chinese checkers set up for the amusement of the Jolly Green Giant.

Keith and Maxine Wyman, the older couple who’d introduced me to the pleasures of the mushroom hunt, the bird watch, and the bacchanalian salmon barbecue, and who’d become in a sense my surrogate parents, had finally found a small but charming house I could rent in La Conner, and Terrie and I moved into it on April 1, 1970. (I recommend that you make all of your major moves on the first of April. Just in case.) That September, as the cabbage went to seed, spelling an end to our surreptitious agricultural subsidies, the ARA advance money arrived from Doubleday. For Terrie, I filled a larder with conventionally procured supplies. Then I bought myself an airline ticket to Tokyo.

Ever since my troop ship sailed out of Yokohama Harbor in late 1955, I’d longed to return to Japan. It was that longing that had lured me to Seattle, where, I’d hoped, graduate study at the UW Far East Institute could lead to work as a correspondent in Asia. I’d been waylaid by visual art, a consuming seductress, but now here I was, fifteen years later, buying my own ticket to that weird and exquisite land where jujitsu warriors wrote nature poems, stunningly sexy women kept crickets as pets, and nary a geisha would raise a plucked eyebrow should I decide to chow down on a chrysanthemum. It wasn’t merely a rainbow chase, however; I had a legitimate, practical reason for flying to Japan: as research for my second novel, I needed to see some whooping cranes.

Now, you needn’t be an ornithologist to know there aren’t any whooping cranes in Japan. Ah so. Whoopers — and there was only one small, imperiled flock of them extant in 1970 — summer at a remote lake in northern Canada, winter on a protected island off the Texas coast. In neither location was it possible to get close enough to view them in any meaningful way. There is, however, a somewhat compact version of “our” majestic crane that summers in Siberia and spends the rest of the year in northernmost Japan, where, at a park near the city of Kushiro, they can be observed without the aid of binoculars. Known as the tancho zuru, this bird has identical markings to its larger North American cousin, which is to say black wing tips and a bright red “skullcap.” (By the time the bird guys got around to naming cranes, I guess “cardinal” had been used up, though for all I know tancho zuru means “pope” in Japanese.)

In the novel I’d just begun, whooping cranes were to serve both as hostages and as living inspiration for the illegal occupiers of the largest all-girl ranch in the west, the birds chosen (doubtlessly in a spasm of anthropomorphism) for what I perceived as their conscious, defiant decision to risk extinction rather than conform; rather than alter their ancient patterns of behavior to accommodate the gassy, brassy intrusions of Homo sapiens, an invasive species that is by nature an unnatural animal. In any case, research led me to believe that the tancho zuru would serve as an adequate substitute, a visual model, for the more evasive whoopers, so I set out across the Pacific to look them over.

Darrell Bob Houston was already in Japan. He’d landed an Alicia Patterson Foundation journalism grant to study and write regular reports on the subject “Youth in Asia.” (When he first told me about it, as I was leaving the P-I, I thought he meant “euthanasia,” which not only creeped me out but struck me as odd, Japanese being traditionally so well versed in hara-kiri they shouldn’t require outside help in ending it all.) Darrell Bob met my flight and after a copious introduction to Asahi beer at a sushi joint, he set me up in the tiny one-room apartment he’d rented as writing-studio-cum-love-nest for trysts with his Japanese paramour, Yoko. (Not that Yoko.) My Tarzanesque pal was married, you see, and his Seattle family had recently joined him in Tokyo.

The room was in Otsuka, a working-class district, and it sat above a kind of greasy chopstick restaurant named Ichi-ban. It was in that plain but self-aggrandizing eatery (ichi-ban in translation is “number one”) that I took my nightly dinner as I waited for D.B. and Yoko (she lived with her parents in an upscale neighborhood) to find time to accompany me on my hunt for the surrogate whooping crane. After dinner, night after night, as typhoon-season rains drenched Tokyo, I’d sip beer and watch European (including Czech and Yugoslavian) movies with Japanese subtitles on the Ichi-ban’s twenty-four-inch black-and-white TV.

One night the feature film was American. A World War II drama about U.S. airmen flying missions over Germany (Japan’s wartime ally), its dialogue had been dubbed so that the American pilots were all spouting Japanese. Sitting there by myself amidst a scattering of non-English-speaking trolly workers, drinking Asahi and watching a global hodgepodge of a movie while a furious rain lashed the cement-and-rice-paper facade of that dingy building alongside the tracks, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more disoriented and alone. Or more thoroughly, serenely, at home. Every true romantic will know what I mean.

In Japan, my typical ensemble included faded jeans, rodeo shirt, leather vest, black cowboy hat, and a short, stiff lasso with which any suburban New Jersey tenderfoot could have performed ersatz rope tricks. Why? I’d had the dumb idea that the Japanese would be as surprised and delighted to encounter an American cowboy in their midst as an American might be to come across a friendly samurai warrior on the streets of, say, Cheyenne or Little Rock. Wrong! Oh, they were surprised all right, but that turned out to be the problem.

Whenever I met someone on the street, he or she would immediately avert their eyes. Occasionally, pedestrians would stop dead in their tracks and turn their back on me until I had safely passed them by. The first time I rode the train, the person I sat down next to rose and moved to the far end of the car. When, with a puzzled expression, I looked to the passenger on my other side for sympathy or at least an explanation, he got up and moved, as well. Such rejection became a regular occurrence. Did the citizens of Tokyo harbor a deep-seated hatred of cowboys? Did they blame Hopalong Cassidy and Billy the Kid for bombing their city back in the forties? Wasn’t the great film director Akira Kurosawa heavily influenced by American westerns?

As I was soon to learn, the Japanese are not a spontaneous people. The Japanese are not fond of surprises. As emotionally fettered by their ancient traditions as they are aesthetically enriched by them, Japanese stoically recoil from any public display of feeling, or any event that might catch them off guard and precipitate a perceived loss of face. They’ve loosened up noticeably in recent years, but in 1970, loss of face remained a fate next to death. All that legendary politeness? The truth is, when the Japanese bow and mutter, “So sorry, so sorry,” what they are really saying is, “Ten thousand curses on me for ever finding myself in a position where I am indebted, however slightly and briefly, to you.”

The lone place in Tokyo where my cowboy drag was appreciated wasn’t the Ichi-ban, where both staff and clientele exhibited persistent indifference, but, rather, a little okonomiyaki joint a couple of blocks away, where I usually lunched.

Okonomiyaki is a dish with an identity crisis: it doesn’t seem to know if it’s an omelet or a pizza. It’s round and flat like a pizza, but has the eggy consistency of an omelet, albeit an omelet topped with chicken, shrimp, or octopus (diner’s choice) and slathered with a tangy dark brown preparation (“bulldog” in translation) composed of soy sauce, spices, and apple butter. The place in my Otsuka neighborhood served nothing but okonomiyaki, which it cooked directly in front of each individual diner on a long narrow grill that ran the length of the counter.

The two countermen had hair almost as long as my own — a rarity in Japan in 1970 — and in me seemed to recognize a kindred spirit, grinning like short-order Buddhas when I presented them with color postcards depicting cowboys on horseback and Indian chiefs in full headdress. I signed the cards “Buffalo Silver,” the name I decided to travel under in Japan, and when I’d enter the establishment after a morning of visiting Zen temples and Shinto shrines, they’d shout out in unison, “Buffaro Sirver!” The rest of our discourse, once I selected my choice of topping, consisted entirely of loud and abrupt exchanges of band names. Apropos of nothing beyond camaraderie, I’d suddenly exclaim, “Grateful Dead!” and one of them would yell back, “Rorring Stones!” I’d shout “Beach Boys!” and they’d respond, “Beaters!” As a traveler in a strange land, I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a more satisfying conversation.

On what haiku master Basho called “the road to the far north,” we sorely tested the Japanese tolerance for exuberant public display: “Buffalo Silver” in his dopey cowpoke outfit, six-foot-five Darrell Bob signing inn registers as “Victor Mature Jr.” (after an actor he believed — incorrectly — he resembled more closely than he did Johnny Weissmuller); and diminutive Yoko, who presented herself in English to her disapproving northern countrymen as “Miss Chocolate Cake,” a tribute to the thing she most admired about Western civilization.

On trains, encouraged by quantities of beer, we were as unrestrained in our deportment (having led Yoko egregiously astray) as the Japanese passengers were closed and reserved, believing all the while, as we sang Hank Williams tunes, drummed on Asahi cans with chopsticks, and occasionally exercised in the aisles, that we were setting an example of how less tiresome life can be when people relax their grip on their egos and indulge the innate human capacity for playfulness; though in actual fact we were probably just assuaging any lingering guilt the Japanese might have harbored about Pearl Harbor.

(Hmmm? Remembering Pearl Harbor, I must concede that under certain conditions the Japanese have, indeed, demonstrated an affection for surprise.)

Kushiro proved to be a drab, dog-bitten port city, reeking of urine and fish, and enveloped in a gray air of unspecified danger. It was as different from Tokyo as Marseille is from Paris; it could have been Palermo to Kyoto’s Florence. The fact that its lone movie theater had external speakers and that the sound track blaring for two grimy blocks along the waterfront was that of Rebel Without a Cause (it was as if Natalie Wood, my boyhood goddess, my first herald of oceanic love, was once again addressing my heart, lighting my way in this shadowy town) contributed to a municipal ambience that was less cosmopolitan than it was just plain queer.

Thus it seemed only fitting when, the next morning, as we boarded the bus that would take us to the crane sanctuary, five or six kilometers out of town, the bus station sound system was broadcasting an American march, the one with the alternative lyrics that begin “Be kind to your fine-feathered friends…” Nor was the park itself any less of a bicultural oddity, for one entered it on foot through a gate in the largest Coca-Cola billboard I have ever seen. On an arch above the billboard were words in Japanese and English. The English read: SACRED CRANES/AKAN NATURALEY PARK. Naturaley.

There wasn’t an abundance of cranes in residence, that autumn being sufficiently mild to delay a wholesale migration from Siberia, but we did get a good close look at the early arrivals. Near the plastic chain-link fence that separated the miles of boggy crane habitat from human visitors, park rangers had strewn ears of corn, and the cranes showed no hesitation about approaching us gawkers to peck at their breakfast: like the whooper, the tancho zuru is not a meek bird. Its defiant nature, its refusal to compromise its way of life to adjust to human “progress,” may be one reason Asians regard the crane as sacred, a veneration American oil drillers and the Army Corps of Engineers fail to share.

While we weren’t treated to the cranes’ magnificent mating dance, a performance unequaled in all of nature (including John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever), the seventeen birds near the fence were no more sedate than we Yanks had been on the train; hopping about on pogo-stick legs, spreading their wings (a span of a good seven feet), pointing their beaks at the sky, and bellowing, often in duet, a call that resembled an amplified extract of Tokyo traffic. After a voyeuristic couple of hours, I figured I’d absorbed enough direct craneness to complement my library research, so we returned to Kushiro where, as our lumbering, squid-eyed innkeeper (he reminded Darrell Bob and me of Lenny from Of Mice and Men) served us a lunch of spiky-crab legs, red caviar, and seaweed, the disembodied voice of Natalie Wood once again came floating over the broken-tiled rooftops and dirty cement, making even the ubiquitous deposits of soot-speckled gull guano seem holy and right. Kushiro mon amour.

We parted company at the airport in Sapporo, a larger, brighter city to the southwest, so that Victor Mature Jr. could become Darrell Bob Houston again and attend to his assignment and his family back in Tokyo. We hugged good-bye, an embrace that caused men in the vicinity to turn away in ill-concealed discomfort. Miss Chocolate Cake bowed to me and said, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” Darrell Bob had taught her the phrase, and having no idea what it meant, she said it softly, sweetly, as though it were the most sentimental of endearments.

Alone now, I took a train down the dragon tail of Hokkaido (as spiky as a Kushiro crab leg), from where, on foot, I boarded a ferry to cross the strait that separates Japan’s northern and central islands. It was dusk and as the big vessel steamed out of Hakodate harbor, the sun was setting in one quadrant, a full moon was rising in another. On all sides of us, the open water was dotted with tiny wooden boats, each outfitted with luminous paper lanterns whose light was useful for attracting squid. It was as though the gods had plunked me down in the middle of a Hokusai wood-block print from the early nineteenth century. A solitary figure on the uppermost deck was playing a flute, ethereally, wistfully, as if coaxing the stars out of hiding, and, heart drumming an earthy accompaniment, my deep attraction to Japanese culture was rekindled.

In disdain for grimy Kushiro and the Coca-Cola commercialism of its “naturaley” crane park, I’d lost sight of wabi-sabi, the aesthetic of finding beauty in the imperfect and unexpected; the secret, private joy of being ever attuned to the Zen of things. These days, when people refer to Japan’s World War II atrocities, to its work-until-you-drop corporate climate, to its incongruent penchant for littering and polluting, and its reprehensible slaughtering of dolphins and whales, I remind myself of that most Zen of counterbalances: a big front has a big back.

On the flight home across the Pacific, I sought refuge from nippophilic brooding by reading a paperback novel. The book was Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which, though it proved to have nothing to do with that branch of the Jackson family that went into the meat-packing business, succeeded pretty well in diverting me. I would not see Japan again until 2002, at which time I traveled the country on a reading and lecture tour sponsored — believe it or not — by the U.S. Department of State. A big back has a big front. Naturaley.