Moontrap - Don Berry Read online

  Below him on the slope, a thunder roared, and the great white smoke-flowers bloomed mysteriously in the dawning sun. The old man raised his rifle high.

  "Hello, bird," he said.

  The wall in front of him exploded into shards and dust, and the massive hammer smashed his frail body and broke the bones of his chest.

  Startled by the thunder, the dark and silent hawk slid down the sky and over emptiness again. An updraft rustled softly in the feathers of its breast, and it gave its body freely to the unseen currents of the world.

  There was time. It would all pass. The mountain would remain when the gross and roaring animals had gone, and in a later time small creatures would be lying on the sun-warmed rocks. Then the solitary dwellers in the wind would come to rake the sky with their sharp wings, for this was their way and the way of the world. It had been so since hawks first hungered in the sky. It had always been so.

  The draft lifted it in a sweeping spiral that rose slowly into the vast silence of the new day.

  Introduction by Jeff Baker

  A few years ago, I was standing on the bank of the Clackamas River with Robin Cody, author of Ricochet River, a novel set on the same river we were skipping rocks across. We were talking about other novels set in Oregon and how there are only a few really good ones.

  H. L. Davis' Honey in the Horn is the only novel by an Oregonian to win the Pulitzer Prize, and that was in 1936. Bernard Malamud wrote A New Life in Corvallis and based it on a fictionalized Oregon State University, then moved to Vermont before the locals figured out they were being teased.

  Cody said he thought the Great Oregon Novel was Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey. No doubt about it, Cody said—Sometimes a Great Notion is big, it's raw, it's stylistically inventive, it gets right what it's like to live in this rugged, beautiful land.

  True enough, I said. I love that book, and I think it shows Keseys brilliance way more than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There's one novel that's better, though, one that has more to do with who we are as Oregonians and how we came so far in such a short time and lost so much along the way. It's Trask by Don Berry, and it changed my life when I read it as a teenager.

  Cody's next rock whizzed suspiciously close to my ear. He liked Trask just fine but thought Notion was more ambitious and more successful on more levels. Kesey was aiming higher, he said, and he pulled it off. He wrote about a family, a town, an industry, a way of life. Nobody's come close to getting so much about Oregon into one book and doing it in such an intense, exciting way.

  I still like Trask better, I said. We agreed to disagree and went back to skipping rocks over the green surface of the river. Three years later, Berry and Kesey were dead. They were Oregon's best fiction writers of the post-World War II generation and, despite obvious differences in temperament and style, had much in common. Both were born elsewhere but considered Oregon their home. Both did their best work before they were thirty in marathon sessions of intense creative concentration they were unable or unwilling to repeat in later years. Both turned away from writing novels in favor of other, more personal artistic pursuits that included living their lives as art, and both spent their last years experimenting with technology that didn't exist when they were ambitious young writers.

  There's a statue of Kesey in downtown Eugene. His life is celebrated by his many friends and his novels have never been out of print. His influence on twentieth-century American culture is immense—as a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, as a proponent of drug use to expand consciousness, and as a rebel who took every opportunity to cheerfully challenge authority.

  Berry's life and accomplishments are less well-known but no less interesting. He was a key figure—along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch—in the small group of writers who attended Reed College in the late 1940s. A self-taught researcher who never took a history class, he wrote an influential history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade called A Majority of Scoundrels. A musician, a painter and sculptor, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, and a spiritual seeker, toward the end of his life he put his restless energies into an amazing Web site (www.donberry.com) and became one of the first writers to fully explore the possibilities of the Internet.

  His most important artistic achievement is the three novels (Trask, Moontrap, and To Build a Ship) published between 1960 and 1963 and written in a spasm of sustained creativity unequaled in Oregon literature. All three are set in the Oregon Territory in the decade before statehood and form a loose trilogy that tells the story of our state's origins better than any history book. They are set firmly on Oregon soil and mix historical figures such as Elbridge Trask, Joe Meek, John McLoughlin, and the Tillamook chief Kilchis with fictional characters. Berry believed fiction could tell larger truths as effectively as history and shared the opinion of Ben Thaler, the narrator of To Build a Ship, who thought "literal truth is not the important consideration . . . history tells us only what we have already made our minds up to believe."

  More than forty years after they were first published, Berry's novels speak for themselves and need no detailed explication. (It is interesting but not necessary, for example, to know that unlike Berry's childless Trask, the real Elbridge Trask—after whom the Trask River is named—and his wife Hannah had eight children before leaving the Clatsop Plains for Tillamook Bay.) A brief examination of who Berry was, how he wrote these remarkable books, and what he did with the rest of his life can provide a more complete context in which to appreciate a true Northwest treasure.

  Berry was born January 23, 1932, in Redwood Falls, Minnesota. His parents were touring musicians; his father played the banjo and guitar, his mother was a singer. His father left the family when Berry was two and did not see his son again until Berry was eighteen, although they enjoyed a friendly relationship in later years. His mother moved frequently around the Midwest and Berry said he attended six schools in five states one year. Berry was small for his age and extremely intelligent, the kind of kid who had to get adults to check out books for him from the library. In grade school, he was given the nickname "China" for his interest in the far east.

  By the time he was fifteen, Berry and his mother were living in Vanport, the city that was destroyed by a flood of the Columbia River in 1948. Berry took the newspaper notice of his death in the flood as an opportunity to leave home and disappear. He attended high school in Portland and was offered scholarships in mathematics by both Harvard and Reed.

  In 1949, Berry was attending Reed, working in the bookstore and sleeping on top of a boiler he tended on campus. He was invited to live in a house on Southeast Lambert Street with several other students, including Snyder, already a serious student of Eastern philosophy and on the way to becoming one of the finest American poets of the twentieth century; Whalen, a Portland native who became a prominent Beat poet and later a Buddhist monk; and Welch, another poet whose Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950-71 is one of the best books from the Beat era. The young men formed what they called the Adelaide Crapsey-Oswald Spengler Mutual Admiration Poetasters Society and drank wine, wrote poetry, and goofed off for the better part of two years.

  "It was probably the birth canal for the Beat Generation," said Berry, who was more interested in painting than poetry at the time. "It was classic post-war Bohemianism, and also one of the richest experiences of my life. The quality of minds involved was extraordinary, and it was also hugely funny."

  As a freshman, Berry was one of the editors of the Reed literary magazine. "I once rejected a poem as being too derivative of Lew Welch," he remembered. "Lew gave me hell later, because he had written it."

  Berry, Snyder, and Whalen studied with the legendary calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds, an inspiration to generations of Reedies. Reynolds would tell his students, "You've got a million bad letters in your fist, and the only way to get rid of them is to write them down."

  "Lloyd was one of the four great teachers of my life," Berry said. "Not necessarily
in any specific detail, but in the sense that he was the first teacher who ignited me, as a candle is ignited from a flame already burning. He showed the most astonishing confidence in my ability. When Iwas a freshman, Lloyd had me deliver the lectures on Chinese art to his art history classes. Those were the only lectures they received on the subject, and Lloyd seemed content. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me ... The clichés of a young artist. Lordy, lordy."

  Berry left Reed in 1951 to earn a living. He had met his future wife by this time and was beginning to write science fiction, a genre that appealed to him because he could sell stories, learn to write, and let his imagination wander freely. His goal was to write a short story every week and he sold about a dozen between 1956 and 1958. But he wanted to write something different, a commercial novel set in the present day on the Oregon coast, and wanted, he said, "to include some folk stories, or Indian legends, or something to give some local depth and flavor."

  Wyn Berry brought home a study by Reed historian Dorothy Johansen of coastal Indian cultures around 1850. Berry's reaction to it, as described in a 1997 email, deserves to be quoted at some length:

  This was not academic history, it was a compilation of very personal anecdotes and records of ordinary people—not "history-makers."

  At one point Dorothy Jo was describing a trip made by Elbridge Trask from the northern coast down to Tillamook Bay (where he later settled) to scout out land. She commented that nobody ever could figure out why he made some particular decision.

  Well, I knew why, because it was exactly the decision I would have made under the circumstances. And at that instant, I had a small epiphany about the nature of history. History was actually made by people. People like me, even. This had never occurred to me before, as I had no sense of history myself, and no particular interest in it.

  That night I climbed up on the roof of the Red House and sat on the peak to watch the sunset over the fields and the Willamette River. I had demonstrated that I could write commercial magazine fiction. But I increasingly felt that if I wanted this career to last for twenty or thirty years I would have to write something that was deeper, that used more of me than commercial writing, or I would eventually become bored. I have always preferred doing things I don't know how to do.

  Watching that sunset, I decided to change direction completely. I decided to write a serious novel of history, and Elbridge Trask's exploratory trip to Tillamook Bay would be the story, and Trask the main character. The next morning I drove down to the Oregon coast, and eventually found the Tillamook County Historical Museum.

  The museum was a treasure trove for Berry, who said that the material he found there served as the basis for all three novels. He spent several weeks reading and copying everything in sight, then moved on to the Oregon Historical Society in Portland. He said he wrote Trask at the same time he was doing his research, "and by the time I had finished the research, I had also finished the novel."

  Maybe so, but there is much that it is in the novel that can't be found in a museum. A bare-bones summary of the plot doesn't begin to do it justice: In 1848, Elbridge Trask, once a trapper and mountain man, has settled on the Clatsop Plains but feels restless. He decides to take a trip to Tillamook Bay and is accompanied by Wakila, a young Clatsop Indian, and Charley Kehwa, a tamanzwis man or spiritual leader of the tribe, who acts as a guide. The party travels from present-day Gearhart south along the coast across Tillamook Head, Cape Falcon, and Neahkanie Mountain. After a shocking, unexpected tragedy, they reach the bay and are greeted by Kilchis, the chief of the Killamook tribe (Berry notes in A Majority of Scoundrels that Tillamook was usually spelled with a "k" sound until 1852). As a result of a power struggle within the tribe and to prove his worthiness, Trask volunteers to go on a vision quest called the Searching, a purification ritual involving fasting and prayer. He survives it, at great cost, and is free.

  That is initially most striking about Trask is its clear, sure sense of place. Glen Love, professor emeritus of English at the University of Oregon and a great champion of Berry's work, wrote in a short study of his novels that "a regional work of literature may be defined as one in which landscape is character, perhaps the central character, so much so that a change in setting would completely alter and destroy the essential quality of the work."

  By that standard, Trask is a regional work. With love and precision, Berry describes everything from Short Sands Beach ("the white lines of breakers were tiny as they marched slowly in, and along their humped green backs ran the quicksilver reflections of the sun") to a rainstorm in the Coast Range ("The rain came like whiplashes, driven out of the low clouds with a startling viciousness. It drummed and whacked against the waxy leaves of the salal with such force it seemed certain to tear them from their stems.")

  Everyone in Trask is unsettled and unsure of where they fit. Trask has traveled the world as a sailor and a mountain man before settling on the Clatsop Plains but now is itching to strike out for somewhere new. Wakila has come of age in a tribe that has been decimated by smallpox and is now succumbing to gambling and alcohol. Charley Kehwa is a spiritual leader who has lived among whites and knows the inevitability of their push for land and power. He sees in Trask a rare white man who respects Indian culture and perhaps can prevent what happened to the Clatsop from happening to the Killamooks.

  Trask's restlessness is much more than a mountain man's independence and love of freedom. In an unsure, inarticulate way, he is on a quest to find a deeper meaning to his life long before he goes on the Searching. He explicitly rejects Christianity and Western society but is unsettled by Charley's dreams and premonitions. He looks to nature and looks within himself in a way that reflects a traditional Eastern path toward enlightenment without ever explicitly stating it.

  That this takes place in a novel set in the Oregon Territory in 1848, within the context of an adventure story about first contact between white settlers and Indians, is remarkable. It's as if Berry gutted a Louis L'Amour novel and replaced it with Somerset Maugham's The Razors Edge. The Searching scenes are the soul of the novel and the final chapter (added, according to Wyn Berry, when the novel was in galleys) is stunningly powerful, a coda that gives fresh meaning to all that has come before.

  "All his senses shared the same bright clarity; the intensity of any simple act of perception was almost unbearable," Berry writes. "The sheer brilliance of color was blinding; the sweet, clear tone of every sound came to him almost as a physical shock, making him catch his breath. The swinging glide of a gull came to have an almost-grasped significance that kept his mind hovering on the edge of joy."

  Trask had a troubled publishing history. Berry said his first agent told him "there was no possible way he could submit such a book to publishers, and thought it better if we parted ways. Which we did." A different agent sold the book to Doubleday, where it was turned over to an editor who Berry thought "confused himself with an author." Unwilling to make the requested changes, Berry returned his advance and withdrew the book at Christmas of 1958. Viking Press eventually bought it and published it in 1960, to strong reviews. (The Saturday Review called it great. The Northwest Review said it was the best first novel by an Oregonian since Honey in the Horn.)

  Berry already had moved on. A Majority of Scoundrels: An Informal History ofthe Rocky Mountain Furr Company was published in 1961. It is an amazing work, a combination of scholarship and narrative that proves true the cliché about history coming alive and shows why many of those closest to Berry considered him a genius. He did much of his research through microfilms from the Missouri Historical Society and was able to go where some of the finest western historians of the century—men such as Hiram M. Chittenden, Dale Morgan, and Bernard DeVoto—had gone before and break new ground.

  Moontrap (1962) and To Build a Ship (1963) were mostly written while Berry was traveling, first in France and then around the world. He carried copies of some of the material he had found in the Tillamook museum with him, including a typed
copy of pioneer Warren Vaughn's diary that is the backbone of To Build a Ship. Wyn Berry, who read and edited all of her husband's manuscripts, said there was something in what the pioneers did and thought that moved Berry.

  "He identified with their values," she said. "He thought the kind of quiet, everyday heroism they had was undervalued in the present day, and he felt many of the agriculture people had sold their birthright. The mountain men, the guys who had to adjust to society—he loved them the most."

  There are references to Elbridge Trask in both Moontrap and To Build a Ship and the books make sense when read in succession. There are plenty of discrepancies and departures from the historical record, all of them falling under the large umbrella of artistic license. Berry said 90 percent of To Build a Ship comes from Vaughn's diary but the novel is narrated by Thaler, not Vaughn, and has a sensibility that is wholly Berry's.

  Like Trask, Moontrap has a lead character who is a mountain man struggling to find a place in settled society. In this case, the setting is Oregon City in 1850 and the character is Johnson Monday, a trapper who wants to make a home with his Indian wife but has "never really been willing to accept this new world he was living in. He had never committed himself fully, and now he had to pay for it."

  Monday pays for his independence early and often, and so do others who live outside the boundaries drawn by the newcomers. Monday's old trapper friend, an unrepentant, uncivilized mountain man named Webster T Webster, is the comic relief, the moral center, and the scene-stealer of Moontrap. Monday wrestles with his dilemmas; Webb curses at his and clings hard to the life he loves. Webb is Berry's most memorable character, one the author said jumped up during the novel's creation and demanded a larger role.