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Summary
Summary
From the author of the bestselling Snow Falling on Cedars comes a compelling new novel about youth and idealism, adulthood and its compromises, and two powerfully different visions of what it means to live a good life.
Author Notes
David Guterson was born in Seattle and later graduated from the University of Washington. Before becoming a full-time writer, Guterson was a high school English teacher and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine.
Guterson has published The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind, a collection of short stories, and Family Matters: Why Home Schooling Makes Sense, a nonfiction book. Snow Falling on Cedars is Guterson's most famous work; it has won the Pen/Faulkner Award and was an American Booksellers Book of the Year Nominee.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) runs out of gas mulling the story of two friends who take divergent paths toward lives of meaning. A working-class teenager in 1972 Seattle, Neil Countryman, a "middle of the pack" kind of guy and the book's contemplative narrator, befriends trust fund kid John William Barry--passionate, obsessed with the world's hypocrisies and alarmingly prone to bouts of tears--over a shared love of the outdoors. Guterson nicely draws contrasts between the two as they grow into adulthood: Neil drifts into marriage, house, kids and a job teaching high school English, while John William pulls an Into the Wild, moving to the remote wilderness of the Olympic Mountains and burrowing into obscure Gnostic philosophy. When John William asks for a favor that will sever his ties to "the hamburger world" forever, loyal Neil has a decision to make. Guterson's prose is calm and pleasing as ever, but applied to Neil's staid personality it produces little dramatic tension. Once the contrasts between the two are set up, the novel has nowhere to go, ultimately floundering in summary and explanation. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1995) follows two friends as their lives take different courses. Neil Countryman and John William Barry meet at a high-school track event in the 1970s. Neil, a working-class boy constantly running races he knows he'll lose, and John William, a wealthy, misunderstood only child obsessed with Gnosticism, forge an unlikely friendship over trips into the wilds of Washington state. While Neil embarks on a traditional life, attending college and backpacking in Europe, John William retreats from society, excavating a cave in the Hoh Valley, where he hopes to live free from the pressures of modern civilization. Once Neil realizes that his friend is serious about his Thoreauesque endeavor, he sets about helping John William, bringing him food and books and becoming an accomplice in his plan to conceal his whereabouts from his family. As the story shifts between past and present, Neil tries desperately to understand the friend he feels responsibility for even as their lives drastically diverge. Dense but involving, Guterson's novel of friendship and ideas is a moving meditation on choices, sacrifices, and compromises made in search of an authentic life.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college - brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary. He stayed up 72 hours reading Goethe. He filled a 50-page notebook with tiny scrawled notes about Henry James. (These weren't class assignments.) He loved absolute principles and what he called "the timeless." He railed against hypocrisy. He liked to stand outside fraternities and shout lines from Byron. When a poem offended him, he ate it - crumple, chew, swallow - and ended up with an intestinal blockage. My friends and I loved Kurt, and we worried about him. "The Other" is a novel about a Kurt who goes off the rails and ends up living as a hermit in a remote forest in Washington State. The author is David Guterson, of "Snow Falling on Cedars" fame. The recluse is John William Barry, sole heir to a banking and timber fortune. John William, as his friends call him, is as old-school Seattle as it gets. His great-great-grandfather was a member of the Denny Party, whose members founded the city in 1851. In the Northwest, this is akin to May-flower lineage. John William is a smart, troubled rich kid who loathes phonies and sellouts, beginning with his own "weaseling, demonic forefathers." He's the kind of guy who drops acid and chants, "No escape from the unhappiness machine." John William tries to escape the machine by taking the hermit's path, holing up in the woods for seven long, cold, lonely years. In "The Other," the hermit's story is told in retrospect by his best friend, Neil Countryman, an English teacher who emerges as the book's most interesting character. They'd make a good buddy movie, Countryman and the hermit. They meet at a high school track meet in 1972. John William runs for Lakeside, Seattle's elite prep school (and Bill Gates's alma mater). Countryman, the son of a carpenter, runs for Roosevelt, a working-class public school. Like many wealthy, virile boys in Seattle, John William tests himself by climbing in the Cascades, where he and Countryman forge a friendship through wilderness-survival adventures. They also smoke a lot of dope around a lot of campfires as John William blathers on about Gnosticism and teases Countryman about his dream of becoming a writer. "'Lackey,' he would say, about half sardonically. 'Fame and money for prostituting your soul. Minister of Information for the master class.'" Trustafarians like John William usually grow out of their Prince Hal phase by their mid-20s, in plenty of time to make partner in Dad's firm by 35. Not John William. He drops out of college, buys a mobile home, parks it by a remote river on the Olympic Peninsula and spends his days reading Gnostic theology. When even that seems too decadent, he carves a cave out of limestone and retreats into the gloom. While John William builds a cave, Neil Countryman builds a life. He gets married, buys a house, has kids. But he never abandons John William. Countryman treks through dense forest to bring his friend food and medicine. He and the hermit conspire to fake John William's disappearance in Mexico, to give him some relief from his worried parents. After a while, Countryman realizes his old friend isn't going to grow out of this Han-Shan-in-the-cave period. "So what, exactly, is the deal with you?" Countryman asks during an exasperated moment. John William's answer: "I don't want to participate." But Countryman keeps pressing. "Idiot," John William finally replies. "You've got your whole life in front of you, maybe 50 or 60 years. And what are you going to do with that? Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money and then die?" Well, yes. "The Other" is a moving portrait of male friendship, the kind that forms on the cusp of adulthood and refuses to die, no matter how maddening the other guy turns out to be. It's also a finely observed rumination on the necessary imperfection of life - on how hypocrisy, compromise and acceptance creep into our lives and turn strident idealists into kind, loving, fully human adults. Wisdom isn't the embrace of everything we rejected at 19. It's the understanding that absolutes are for dictators and fools. "I'm a hypocrite, of course," Countryman says, reflecting on his own life and John William's doomed pursuit of purity. "I live with that, but I live." David Guterson broke out of the box nearly 15 years ago with his wildly successful debut novel. Neither of his subsequent novels, "East of the Mountains" and "Our Lady of the Forest," has matched that first book's sales, but here's the admirable thing: His books keep getting better. There's a deus ex machina at the end of this new one that, a little disappointingly, plants guilt for John William's struggles at the feet of a certain suspect. But the voice of Neil Countryman is that of a good, thoughtful man coming into middle-class, middle-aged fullness, and his recollections of life in Seattle have a wonderful richness and texture. This Seattle isn't just a trendy backdrop peopled with Starbucks-sippers at the Pike Place Market. Guterson's characters live in the city as it really is. They grab fish and chips at Spud on Green Lake, browse for used books at Shorey's, trip on the mushrooms that grow wild in Ravenna Park. Guterson knows Seattle the way Updike knows small-town Pennsylvania, and there are moments in "The Other" that have a "Rabbit at Rest" quality, as tossed-off observations and bits of dialogue capture the essence of a place and a time. In the early years of his friendship with John William, Countryman wanders through the Barry home, a Laurelhurst Tudor, noticing the white-bellied nudes on the bathroom wallpaper - I've been in that house, or at least its neighbor. Decades later, he listens to his son suggesting they eat at a new brewpub that specializes in mussels and frites - I've been there, too. The beauty is that Guterson doesn't stop to explain. He just drops in these pitch-perfect notes and keeps the music going. Bruce Barcott is the author of "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw." He fives in Seattle.
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Blue-collar Neil Countryman meets Seattle blue-blood John William Barry while running track. The novel opens with a lot of references to 1970s pop culture: television shows such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart, and athletes and celebrities like Steve Prefontaine, Carl Lewis, the Doobie Brothers, and Gerald Ford. Guterson describes Neil and John William's generation as "slightly late for the zeal of the sixties and slightly early for disco." He depicts a 34-year friendship that survives their many differences. It starts out with a shared love of nature, running, and hiking the Olympic Mountains. But as they mature, the men drift in different directions. As the first Countryman to attend college, Neil takes his education seriously and chooses a traditional life. In contrast, John William drops out of school, decries hypocrisy, studies philosophic thought (most notably Gnosticism), and retreats into a life in the Olympic forest, in a bit of a Thoreau-like existence. His mental state is most certainly fragile, likely inherited from his mother. But in spite of their differences, Neil honors their "blood pact," hiking in food, supplies, and companionship, and, most importantly, he honors John William's desire to keep his location a secret. The 1970s setting will hook teens in the opening, and the lyrical description of the Olympic Mountains forest will keep them reading. The biggest draw, however, will be the themes of friendship and loyalty, and how they survive through the years.-Paula Dacker, Charter Oak High School, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
"Now they would have the run home together". With this section title, 50 or so pages in, this novel places itself in a tradition of American literature. The same line concludes one of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, a typical Hemingway tale of male bonding and regret that adventure should come to an end. The identification is important for two reasons. The first is that togetherness and running (albeit athletic runs, rather than ski runs) are important in The Other : the extended opening scene describes a road race in which the narrator, Neil Countryman, first meets his friend, John William Barry - the "other" of the title - who passes him in the closing seconds of the race "like a shadow in a cartoon or a mirror-figure in a dream". The second reason is the vibration the reference sets off along a certain line of mainly masculine American letters, an outdoorsy handiness and hardiness that goes from Huckleberry Finn through Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy. There has always been that strain in Guterson, too, along with the powerful evocation of landscape that made Snow Falling On Cedars and Our Lady of the Forest so successful. But it's far from the whole story. With this novel, Guterson has made a highly significant contribution to American literature, touching on a number of persistent themes, including Puritan beginnings, westward expansion and journeys of exploration, ecological collapse, transcendentalism, apocalypticism, social decline, mass-media vacuity and the interplay of wealth with bohemia. That's a big list, and if it seems as if boxes are being ticked, that's exactly right: this is a book narrated by a literature teacher, and sometimes it feels as if he is running through not just his life and John William's, but also his course modules. Far from being a flaw, this sets up very well the character of a failed creative writer who suddenly finds his subject when his boyhood friend leaves him $440m and he becomes a minor celebrity. We know early on that John William has died and left Countryman this money; only gradually do the details of the death emerge, along with the unfolding psychological drama of the relationship between the two men. John William is from a long-established, old-money Seattle family, whereas Countryman is of "blue collar, lunch pail origin", as a journalist puts it when the story breaks. First a hermit's corpse is found in a cave in the Washington state/Canadian wilderness of the North Cascades (an area larger than Belgium), next thing Countryman is the "19th-richest person in Washington state". He is rechristened Bling by his pupils, and part of the novel is about how he and his family deal with their newfound wealth. But the heart of the story is Countryman's running of supplies up to John William's bleak hermitage, after receiving a note saying "Countryman - get out here before it's too late". He finds John William subsisting on elk jerky, roots and tinned food. The episodic narrative of the hermitage's development is sustained by the digging out of a cave; there is also a "hot tub" fed by a spring, into which John William can dip his ringworm-scarred body. Dressed, he appears like a figment or flashback: "With his head coarsely sheared, his foot-long beard, his buckskin shirt, and his rudimentary moccasins, he was so fragrantly absurd, so filthy, so post-apocalyptic, and at the same time so evocative of the early 19th-century American west as portrayed in a bad museum diorama, that anyone with the poor luck to come across him could not be blamed for assuming he'd gone comically mad . . ." The "hot tub" as an image of materialistic American life is thus set against another cultural stereotype, that of the backwoods millenarian holing up for Armageddon with beans, bullets and bacon. There are some aspects of this in John William, but he's actually closer to the Unabomber, sharing a distaste for technocratic society. There are shades of the eco-warrior and shaman in him, too, although his personal philosophy comes from a childhood-derived belief that there can be "no escape from the unhappiness machine". John William's beliefs are set against his ironic rendition of Countryman as a "loyal citizen of the hamburger world". It's in this dialectic that the novel is at its most sophisticated, pitching American family values against the outsider theme, but not monochromatically. John William tells Countryman he can't write books with a cheeseburger in his hands; Countryman says that's the only way to do it. Although the book is set mainly in the 1970s and 80s, all this is played out in memory within a context of recent political events. We are told that the building in which John William's corporate lawyer Mark Sides (a former hippy activist) reveals the windfall was targeted by the 9/11 bombers. "Sides shrugged. 'I know why they hate us,' he said. 'I hate us, too.'" The balancing act of playing a scene from memory at the same time as making it seem present, never easy in a novel, is one of the many remarkable things about The Other . Others include a heavy dose of satire in the John Irving/Paul Theroux mode, and what seems like a submerged exploration of the author's own sensibility. There's genuine patriotism here, too, combined with environmental rigour. It is as if Guterson is sending a message to the nation. Best of luck to you, Neil Countryman. We wish you happiness. Couched like that by a TV interviewer in the closing scene of the book, the words are both authentic and ironic at the same time, which is no mean feat. At a critical political juncture, they may be just the medicine America needs. Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland is published by Faber. To order The Other for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-guterson.1 The heart of the story is [Neil Countryman]'s running of supplies up to [John William Barry]'s bleak hermitage, after receiving a note saying "Countryman - get out here before it's too late". He finds John William subsisting on elk jerky, roots and tinned food. The episodic narrative of the hermitage's development is sustained by the digging out of a cave; there is also a "hot tub" fed by a spring, into which John William can dip his ringworm-scarred body. Dressed, he appears like a figment or flashback: "With his head coarsely sheared, his foot-long beard, his buckskin shirt, and his rudimentary moccasins, he was so fragrantly absurd, so filthy, so post-apocalyptic, and at the same time so evocative of the early 19th-century American west as portrayed in a bad museum diorama, that anyone with the poor luck to come across him could not be blamed for assuming he'd gone comically mad . . ." John William's beliefs are set against his ironic rendition of Countryman as a "loyal citizen of the hamburger world". It's in this dialectic that the novel is at its most sophisticated, pitching American family values against the outsider theme, but not monochromatically. John William tells Countryman he can't write books with a cheeseburger in his hands; Countryman says that's the only way to do it. Although the book is set mainly in the 1970s and 80s, all this is played out in memory within a context of recent political events. We are told that the building in which John William's corporate lawyer Mark Sides (a former hippy activist) reveals the windfall was targeted by the 9/11 bombers. "Sides shrugged. 'I know why they hate us,' he said. 'I hate us, too.'" - Giles Foden.
Kirkus Review
In this philosophically provocative and psychologically astute novel, two boyhood friends take very different paths: The richer one renounces all earthly entanglements, while the poorer one becomes unexpectedly wealthy beyond imagination. Once again, Guterson (Our Lady of the Forest, 2003, etc.) writes of the natural splendor of his native Pacific Northwest, though the ambiguity of isolating oneself in nature, rejecting family and society in the process, provides a tension that powers the narrative momentum to the final pages. There are parallels between this story and Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book Into the Wild, as the novel relates the life and death of John William Barry, whose mother and father come from two of Seattle's wealthiest families, but who forsakes his elite destiny to achieve posthumous notoriety as "the hermit of the Hoh." What distinguishes Guterson's novel is the narrative voice of Neil Countryman (perhaps an unfortunate surname), who has been Barry's best and maybe only friend since the two competed at a track meet. On a hike into the wildness, Barry forces his blue-collar buddy to swear a blood oath never to reveal this secret spot to anyone. That oath is tested when Barry disappears from society and enlists his friend's complicity in covering his tracks. The first one in his family to attend college, Countryman becomes an aspiring writer who supports himself as a high-school English teacher, and who marries and raises a family. Yet if Barry is ostensibly "the other" of the title, so is Countryman, whose bond with a friend who may have a severe (possibly hereditary) psychological disturbance seems stronger than the one he shares with anyone else. Ultimately, Barry rewards Countryman for the latter's complicity in keeping a secret and helping the hermit sustain himself, but the greater reward for Countryman is the material that becomes this book. When a novelist scores as popular a breakthrough as Guterson did with Snow Falling on Cedars, a long shadow is cast over subsequent efforts. Here, he succeeds in outdistancing that shadow. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Neil keeps mum when friend John William decides to ditch civilization and go into the wild, but he's less sure about helping him disappear completely. With an eight-city tour; reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
No Escape from the Unhappiness Machine I attended Roosevelt (the Teddies, Teds, or Roughriders), a public high school in North Seattle, while my friend John William Barry was a student at Lakeside, our city's version of an East Coast private academy like Phillips Exeter or Deerfield. Besides slumping at my desk all day and getting high in Cowen Park at lunch, I also ran the 880--today called the eight-hundred-meter or the half-mile--for the RHS track team. It was a good niche for me. You didn't need to be fast or have the wind of the distance runner. Mostly what you needed was a willingness to sign up. As a sophomore in 1972, I was a good enough half-miler to represent RHS with a time of 2:11.24. To put this in context, the world record in '72 for the half-mile was held by Dave Wottle, with a time of 1:44.30. Roosevelt's best half-miler of all time is Chris Vasquez, '97, at 2:01.23. This is a race that takes runners twice around the red cinder oval found behind many high schools--I say this so you can imagine me losing to Vasquez by about thirty yards, or think of me still rounding the last bend, at the far end of the grandstands, while Wottle is crossing the finish line, arms raised victoriously. Either is a useful picture of me--of someone intimate with the middle of the pack. There's good and bad in that. I remember one race more vividly than others. It's '72, so Nixon is president, though he and everything else, the world, seem far away from Seattle. I'm sixteen and wear my hair like Peter Frampton's and a mustache like Steve Prefontaine's. (Because of this mustache, I'm sometimes referred to at school as "the Turk," after the guy in the Camel cigarette ads. I'm not Turkish, but my mother's father, whom I never met, was what people call Black Irish, and possibly I inherited his coloring.) I've got on hi-cut satin shorts and a satin jersey emblazoned with Roughriders , and I'm at the starting line along with seven other runners, six with better qualifying times than mine. Despite them, I'm a believer that if the ninety-nine-pound mother in the apocryphal story can lift the front end of a Volkswagen off her crushed toddler, I can win today. I'll dispense with the obligation to describe the weather--whether or not it was a sultry afternoon, with clouds of newly hatched mayflies above the track, or a windless May day smelling of moist turf and mown grass, is beside the point--and cut, literally, to in medias res: the eight of us stalwart and tortured young runners rounding the third curve of a high-school track and coming up on 250 yards. It's my usual MO--out front early and counting on adrenaline to keep me there, but with heels nipped and a sinking feeling that's anathema to winning. A race is a conversation with yourself, motivational in quality, until somebody interrupts by pulling away from you, and then it becomes an exercise in fathoming limits. Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated. The right track term is "running in a pack." That's us--a band of runners hardly separated. One keeps exhaling humidly on my shoulders. Another's left forearm hits my right elbow on its backswing. A runner pulls up beside me--the way a freeway driver pulls even in the adjacent lane to take your pulse--and I assess his chances with a panicked glance. Not strictured yet; striding with more ease than I feel; biding his time; relaxed. Working up a freshly adrenalized surge, I gain a quarter-step on him, but purchased with the last of my reserves. The early leader in a half-mile race rarely crosses the finish line first. But he wants to have had the experience of leading--that's part of it--and he's perennially hopeful that, this time, things will be different in the home stretch. I still feel that way in the early part of curve three: that I might have heretofore undiscovered deposits of leg strength and cardiovascular capacity, not to mention will, at my disposal, all this against the grain of my foreboding. It turns out that my foreboding makes sense; at the curve's apogee, I know I'll flag, and with that, the flagging happens. Three runners pass me, going strong. I'm needled by regret. Why don't I have a better strategy than running as fast as I can from start to finish? I've squandered my energy; I've incurred too large a deficit. But it isn't in me to plan; I just run, as my coach says, on unfocused emotion. These other runners, by the halfway mark--end of lap one, where we're lashed on by friends and exhorted by teammates, a small fire zone of screaming and technical advice--are just stretching out and finding a rhythm, while I'm already in a battle with depletion. I drop to sixth, dragging with me a familiar sense of failure. Then, on the back stretch, the runner in seventh tries to pass me, too. To anybody watching we're in a pointless and even pathetic battle between losers, but for me what's happening feels critical. Against good tactical judgment--it's a move that slows you--I indulge in another assessment of an opponent: like me, long-haired; like me, in earnest; like me, goaded forward by, the word might be, convictions. In other words, this runner is approximately my doppelgänger. Ask any track coach. The half-mile is a race for unadulterated masochists. Neither a sprint nor a distance event, it has the worst qualities of both. It's not a glorious race, either. A lot of people can name a sprinter or two--Carl Lewis, for example--or a famous miler like Roger Bannister, but can very many name even a single half-miler? No athletic romance attaches to the half-mile. It's not a legendary or even notable feat to beat other runners over 880 yards. At track meets, the half-mile contest is somehow lost between more compelling competitions, an event that unfolds while fans thumb their programs or use the bathroom. Into this gap of a race, this sideshow, step runners in search of a deeper agony than they can find elsewhere. They want to do battle with suffering itself. It's the trauma they want, the anguished ordeal. It's the approximately two minutes of self-mortification or private crucifixion. All half-milers have a similar love of pain. So this race is an intimation and an opening. In two minutes' time, you get a glimpse. I do, on the afternoon I'm telling about. There's a kind of synchronicity that can happen in a running race, and it happens now. We run in tandem, my near doppelgänger and I. In running parlance, we match strides. I'm measuring him, as he, no doubt, is measuring me--all the while throwing ourselves forward into fresh pain, so that there are two perceptions, pain and the close presence of another agonized half-miler. In parallel this way, and canceling each other out, we're neither of us ahead or behind for maybe forty-five seconds. That's an unusually long time to run neck and neck in the 880. I'm oxygen-deprived, so everything looks well lit and startling, and from this perspective I see what I probably wouldn't see otherwise. This guy, right here, running next to me, is a version of me. We both feel, romantically, that our running is transcendent. How do I know this? From running alongside him. I also have the benefit of hindsight. Thirty-four years have passed, but I still remember how, in the final five yards, my double frees himself--like a shadow in a cartoon or a mirror-figure in a dream--and beats me by three-quarters of a stride. I'm bent over and spent, my hands on my knees after the race, breathing hoarsely and looking at the ground, when he comes over to shake my hand with what I think at first is a grating sincerity. The grip is vigorous. The expression is heartfelt and, post-race, ruddy. The stance is upright, the posture exclamatory. This is gracious victory personified, and for a moment I think--it says Lakeside on his jersey--that what I'm seeing is obligatory patrician good manners, a valorous lad with his cursory and vapid Victorian Well done! while his heaving breath subsides. But no. He's just fiercely putting forward what he feels--he's honest. There's a sentiment to be noted, life is short, and he doesn't want to just pass by. "Thanks for the push," John William declares, between bouts of sucking wind. "I just about died." That's how I met the privileged boy who would later become "the hermit of the Hoh"--as he's been called by the Seattle newspapers this spring, in articles mentioning my name, too--that loner who lived in the woods for seven years and who bequeathed me four hundred and forty million dollars. ... My name's Neil Countryman. I was born in this city of wet, high-tech hubris, which was called, at first, maybe with derision, "New York Alki," meaning "New York Pretty Soon" in Duwamps. Besides me, there are seventeen Countrymans in the Seattle phone book, and all of them are my relatives--my father's two brothers; their sons, grandsons, and unmarried granddaughters; and my two sons. We're close-knit, as we sometimes say about ourselves. Over the years, we've closed ranks around deaths, accidents, follies, and addictions. On the other hand, we shy away from intimacy as if such shyness was a value. We don't ask each other the more difficult questions. I'm generalizing, of course, but a Countryman who wants to go his own way will find, among his relatives--universally on the male side--straight-faced if sometimes dishonest approval. Clannish as we are, we believe in privacy, even when it's obvious that someone you love is making a terrible mistake. As a boy I enjoyed, with my sister, Carol, Laugh-In, Get Smart , and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We lived in a ranch house in the northeast part of town, modern for its time and built by my father, with an intercom system my mother used to call Carol and me from the rec room. My family went on summer vacations in-state, sometimes to Ocean Shores, but always to Soap Lake, in the sagebrush interior, where we would join other Cavanaughs--my mother was a Cavanaugh--for an annual rendezvous. At Soap Lake, my mother liked to loll around on a blow-up mattress and drink Tab. Once, I lost a beach ball in the wind, and by the time I noticed, it was a quarter-mile out. My mother brought it back, breathing hard but looking athletic. I remember how surprised I was, when I was eight, to see her so competent on a pair of skis at Alpental. I was under the impression that we'd gone to Alpental so that Carol and I could slide down a hill on inner tubes while our parents stood around with their hands in their pockets, but instead my mother, on rentals, disappeared up a chairlift and materialized much later to spray snow at my father with a stylish hockey stop. My father brushed off the snow as if it was lint on a tuxedo, which was his idea of humor. He was compact, with a recessed hairline and long sideburns, tight-lipped when corrected, and famous among my cousins for his forearms, which bulged like bowling pins. I remember him stretched out on the Cavanaughs' steep roof after it was damaged by a fallen tree, his head downslope, a hammer between his teeth, reaching with his left hand to start a nail by stabbing it into a rafter until it stuck there. My father was a finish carpenter first, but he was also a pack rat. He brought home, from his jobs, used refrigerators and freezers, washers and dryers, coils of plastic pipe, and rolls of scavenged wire, and stored it all in our backyard under an open-air shed he'd built out of salvaged materials. When he got older, he drove a Corolla, but he didn't listen to its radio very much, because, as he said, it was more interesting to listen to its motor. He also felt it was useful to smoke a Camel before heading for the bathroom. When I asked him if he got bored in there, he told me he read the Post-Intelligencer , starting with the obits, first to see if anyone he knew had "kicked," second to mull the ages of the deceased in relation to his own years, so that he'd remember not to feel sorry for himself. For a while, my mother sang with the Merry Mavericks--about a dozen men and women with a Peter, Paul and Mary look but an Up with People sound. They performed at Christmas in the Food Circus at the Seattle Center. My mother was a soloist. Hitting her high notes, she sounded like Judy Garland. I remember her coming off the stage dressed in red-and-green satin and taking Carol and me across the food court for caramel corn. Carol and I were glad when all of this was over, because we only liked pop tunes. In fact, the first album I bought, the summer after eighth grade, was Bread's On the Waters , because "Make It with You," sung by David Gates in falsetto, moved me. In wood shop, I built speaker cabinets out of low-grade walnut, then installed tweeters, woofers, and de rigueur large woofers from SpeakerLab. I traded a cousin some speakers like this for a battered drum set, and he showed me how to play the opening licks, complete with cowbell, of "Honky Tonk Woman." For two years, I washed dishes at a Mexican restaurant for $2.65 an hour, partly to fund drum lessons from a burned-out but still-hip jazzman. I kept a fish tank in my room, went bowling sporadically, and played hockey on roller skates. I had a normal interest in girls, which I admit is a declaration dispensing with the subject, so I will add that I was the sort of hapless boy who came away from cheap encounters with the blues. John William and I were of the generation that was slightly late for the zeal of the sixties and slightly early for disco. The most popular song, I think, in '74, was "Takin' Care of Business" by the Bachman-Turner Overdrive, though the Doobie Brothers were also esteemed. In Seattle, white guys wore flares, shags, and Pacific Trail jackets; white girls wore sailor pants or 501 jeans and let their hair fall around their faces. We were seven when JFK was killed, twelve when King was killed, and fourteen when four students were killed at Kent State, but by the time we were old enough to fathom "the Zeitgeist" (a term getting play in '74), there was détente, H-bomb drills were quaint, and there was no more draft. Always on the front page of the Seattle Times was inexplicable news, for a teen-ager, of tariffs and wage and price controls. Who cared? Gerald Ford became president in '74 and began hitting people with golf balls, apparently, thousands of miles away from Seattle. Everything, in fact, was thousands of miles away from Seattle. It was the portal to the North Pacific. It was where you outfitted to travel in Alaska, gateway to the Last Frontier. Excerpted from The Other by David Guterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
