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time you saw the stars at the Sheep Queen’s?
    There’s always that mist off the Garcia,” I said, starting the car.
    Maybe they had been following me. People were, they truly were.
    Anyway, now I was following them. And I would let them get away.
    If you drive back inland along almost any of the hill roads, as I did along Shipwreck Road three times a week, you pass out of the fog into a dusty silence filled with tall second-growth redwoods. They make a windbreak for the crumbling old ranches, and they stand over the abandoned lumber camps that brought down their mothers and fathers, the original giants, and they shade and hide the twisted dregs of the old communes—once the best, the finest people, lured here by the piping of a lovely song and then held by drugs or religion, iso-28 / Denis Johnson

    lated minds bending around tightly to feed on themselves.
    Those ghostly hippies, do you think I feel sorry for them? No. They came here and did what they dreamed of. The lovely song becomes a shape, and strides forth.
    Melissa and I came into the town of Point Arena on the particular day I’m thinking of, and I turned off the Coast Highway and climbed into the hills.
    I’m thinking about the day I took her to see my marijuana garden, an indiscretion that added to my fears a thousandfold.
    I took us far back on Shipwreck Road, miles past where the pavement ended, the Porsche sliding on the gravel curves, hauling a small hurricane of dust. Our tongues tasted of dirt, but back away from the sea the day was far too hot to put the top up. Melissa closed her eyes and left her face empty and hard, stroked by feathery shadows.
    When we parked, the trees, which had seemed to be rushing to this place alongside of us, stopped immensely. I cut the motor: the silence played one true, clear note. Beside me Melissa opened her eyes.
    From this ridge we looked down into a canyon a quarter mile deep and half a mile across, and saw the peaks beyond Napa Valley, a hundred miles away.
    “Do you know where we are?” I said.
    “It’s quiet. I feel like we’ve driven to under the ocean.”
    “This is where I grow my pot.”
    I was trusting her with a great secret, but she was just drunk.
    That’s what touched me so electrically, so sadly: she didn’t partake of our dramas. Really, I never saw her more clearly portrayed than in the light of my first glimpse of her at the local high school play: sitting on the floor, in the shadows, up front with the smallest children, while an arm’s length away frightened adolescents strutted the stage and shouted dialogue.
    Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?
    I left her and climbed down off the ridge. First I walked. I stumbled as the canyonside steepened. I sat down and slid on my butt. I stopped now and then, just to make the climb last. Far below me the slope gentled and vegetation flooded the bottom of the world, Already Dead / 29

    mostly evergreen on the shady south, and, on the north side, oak and the relatives of oak, their shadows pasted on the platinum grasses. Here and there the blighted chinkapins were resurrecting themselves in this season, dead at the tops from some previous devastation, but living up out of their tragedies somewhat on the order of certain majestic, crippled alcoholic women. And the assembled redwoods, really just youngsters, less than a century old, but already a hundred feet tall, drinking in everything audible, giving none of it back…I felt about these trees that in their mindful silence they were inventing a new, an unexampled bliss, to which I’d be admitted when I shed my scruples.
    At the moments most precarious for my sanity I’m lost somewhere on these back roads, teetering on these cliffs, witnessing this grandness and longing to match it with the grandest gestures, acts equally solitary and monstrous, things I can never confess. Is it possible for you to understand?—to imagine?—coming around a