End of Immortality, The

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Mason, David

In my early twenties I was fairly certain I was immortal. Granted, my family was populated with mortals, some of whom had problems I could detail here if this were another sort of memoir. (In high school I considered Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, with its drug addicts and late-night soliloquies, to be my family's story, my fate.) But I came from a clan of travelers, mountaineers and wanderers, and the idea of escape occurred naturally to me. I left home at eighteen and too rarely went back.

At nineteen I took a year off from college, worked in Alaska for seven months, then spent another seven on the road in Britain, Ireland and the Continent. After the first five months in Alaska I wound up running the freezer crew on a cannery barge. It was a gutted World War II-vintage Liberty Ship, chained and cabled to shore amid the storm-pelted hills of Dutch Harbor, an Aleutian landscape of spectacular bleakness.

I remember standing on the upper deck in the dead of night while my crew unloaded pallets of frozen crab to a cargo ship that would carry it south to Bellingham, Washington, my hometown. I wore a freezer suit, watch cap and heavy boots, and standing next to me in a down parka was my boss, a man twice my age. We neared the end of a forty-hour shift, but the electric forklift in the freezer had broken down, so there we waited, snowflakes slanting through worklights on the masts of both ships. I was a hardworking boy and this boss had taken a shine to me. That night he said, "You could run this place if you wanted to."

Perhaps he was right. I was only nineteen, but people thought I was smart. They called me Shakespeare because I was always reading or scribbling in ajournai in downtime. I was, though, a truly mixed up kid. Immortal, true enough, but not entirely well. A cynic about everything, especially the whole notion of marriage and family life, yet utterly alone and vulnerable, given to poetic stares and breaking into song when I thought no one could hear me. Nixon had resigned that summer, and when the news reached Dutch Harbor it only confirmed me in my cynicism. I had taken up with a cigar-smoking girlfriend whose family life was packed with suicides and other disasters. And there was some central core of arrogance within me. I had other options, and could go back to college. I wasn't fated to run a seafood processing operation a thousand miles from anywhere.

So I turned to this man, my boss, and let him have it. I gave him the plan-college, travel, then fame as a writer. Nobody could stop me.

He was too tough to show what he thought of my plan, though for a moment he looked like he'd eaten bad lettuce. We dropped the subject and stood there in silence till the work resumed.

A few months later I got out of a stranger's car somewhere in the Scottish border country, thanked the driver for the ride, slung my household on my back and started walking. It was a long walk: much of the time from January to july 1975 I was on the road, with brief residencies in London and Paris and Spain. A self-styled down-and-outer, nearly always alone, never letting friendships get below the surface, I loved the exhilaration of an empty road stretching ahead of me. Even snowfall and the prospect of sleeping in some ruined croft did not bother me. I had wool clothes and a down sleeping bag and was confident I could weather anything Scotland could throw at me.

Years later my father would describe how he came to London on a trip with Claire, who would become his second wife, and how I met them at the airport looking like a tramp, one sole flapping loose from a hiking boot, my old sweater drooping to my knees, my face all smile and wispy beard. I was strong from hiking hundreds of miles. If I was mortal, I hardly knew it.

My circumnavigation of Scotland involved a stay in Orkney, hitchhiking across the north coast and down through the Hebrides. Later that spring I went to Belfast in search of an American, a friend's friend who might show me around. I found his house in a Protestant neighborhood of neat brick houses just downhill from a Catholic one of bare larders and blocked-up windows. A British stockade stood at the border of the two neighborhoods, patrols leaving at regular intervals despite a recently declared cease-fire. Across from the stockade was a park, and after a long day there talking to children and pensioners, I learned that the American was away on the Continent for a month. The jovial old park keeper said he would take care of me.

When the sun set and it was time for him to close up, he gave me the last bit of food he had and locked me into his hut so I could have a safe night's sleep. He'd tell the other keeper to look out for me next day, he said. So there I was, reading For Whom the Bell Tolls by lamplight in a tiny space with a coal stove for warmth and a pot for tea, then trying to sleep in my bag on a thin foam pad stretched on the concrete floor. I imagined all sorts of dangers, but heard little of the world outside.