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Across the lower two cables he had begun to wire lengths of two-by-four for treads—a tedious job, obviously, not very neatly done and not more than a tenth completed. I set foot on the thing, but it was like trying to walk a horizontal rope ladder.
    From across the creek we inspected Peck’s domestic arrangements. He had built the platform considerably larger than the tent required, leaving himself a front porch seven or eight feet deep and a dozen wide. A green canvas patio chair, one of those bat-shaped things, sat on it beside a length of redwood log that acted as a coffee table. A beer can stood on the log. The tent was ill pitched, its ropes straining the canvas into wrinkles and its sidewalls drooping, but even so the place looked snug. Why the hell didn’t we think of putting a camp down here? I asked Ruth. After Peck moved out we ought to build ourselves a teahouse, with a high arching Japanese bridge, so that in the rainy season we could go down there and brew a pot of tea and listen to the un-Californian sound of running water.
    Saint Simeon Stylites with conveniences, Thoreau with amenities, Peck gave us glimpses of his Coleman lantern shining through the trees, and once or twice he himself moved in our vision, easing a yellow plastic pail of water across his bridge or working around the tent. But then the rains came on heavily so that it was too muddy to walk the horse trail or the bottoms, and we saw him only from a distance, and checked his presence or absence by whether or not the tarp-covered Honda was parked under the bay tree. Once, coming home in a downpour and seeing his tent blooming with light through threshing limbs and sheets of water, I half envied him his mixture of exposure and snugness. I can think of nothing pleasanter than to be close to danger or discomfort, but still to be protected, preferably by one’s own foresight and effort. Civilization began somewhere around that feeling, and I didn’t disagree with Ruth when she suggested that there was hope for any Caliban who displayed, however ineptly, the impulse to build his own shelter.
    Since the day we encountered him in the bottoms, we had not exchanged words, but we were steadily and sometimes intensely aware of him. In a way that sometimes exasperated me, he imposed himself on us as a neighbor. We looked his way, driving in and out; we noted the sound of his motorcycle going and coming; we were aware when he was at home and when away. And sometimes in the evenings when we walked twenty times around the house because that was the only way of getting any exercise without wading in mud, we heard his guitar, so disarming a sound that it seemed no denizen of the hills was more natural and appropriate than Jim Peck. One morning after a big storm I caught myself looking across almost anxiously to see if he had weathered it.
    “It seems so lonely for him,” Ruth said. “He doesn’t seem to have any friends, does he?”
    I looked at her long and hard. “Are you maybe hinting we ought to have him up for a meal?”
    It is not often I can fluster her, but she was flustered. She said defensively, “I wouldn’t think it was completely out of the question.”
    “Thanksgiving, maybe?”
    She flared up. “Well, why not? What would be wrong with that?”
    “It isn’t like you to be sentimental, for God’s sake,” I said. “Are you kidding yourself that he sits down there missing the comforts of home? Were you getting your mouth fixed to taste his touching gratitude for a homemade piece of pie?”
    “He’s young,” she said resentfully. “He’s human.”
    “Young yes, human hardly,” I said. “Are you prepared to serve us up a Zen-diet Thanksgiving?”
    “If I knew how, I wouldn’t mind.”
    “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t sit next to him at table. What’s more, he wouldn’t come.”
    Probably he wouldn’t have come, and almost certainly we would have had a hell of a time enjoying his company. But I wish now I had let him