WALKING IT OFF by Doug Peacock

WALKING IT OFF: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness by Doug Peacock. (Eastern Washington University Press: Cheney and Spokane, WA, 2005)

I bought this book at the Great Falls Festival of the Book where Doug and Andrea Peacock spoke about a more recent book, but I’d been interested in it for a while. It was the walking trope that spoke to me. “Walking it off” -- that means if you get hurt, you’re a little shocky, you walk and that rhythm pulls you back together so you breathe again, your blood circulates, your muscles re-coordinate. The Workman’s Comp had an ad for a while about what a person could do “when walking it off isn’t enough.” It showed a cowboy being tough.

Peacock is not just walking off trauma -- his is a “walking meditation” about himself, his friend Ed Abbey, the burden of life, why a voluntary death is not acceptable, and more. (Walking meditation is a formal Asian technique as well as part of the proper use of a labyrinth pattern on the ground.) He even takes books to read and loves classical music so much that I wouldn’t be surprised if he had an iPod, though he didn’t say so. This is a sophisticated account of walks layered with history of place that reaches back sometimes thousands of years and other times mere decades. These are not young man walks, depending on muscle and endurance, showing off, but walks of men with health damaged by years of abuse, especially alcoholism. The walks worked: H*d*k* Lives! (I spell it that way because using the name of the character based on Peacock in a blog always brings in a bunch of nutty comments from zealots.)

I can’t think of any other autobiographical writing in which the writer is shadowed by a mythical literary invention based on him, let alone one of such cultural significance that one finds it painted on fences, scratched into cement. I wonder what those scratchers would think of the idea that the reason H*yd*k* and Abbey wanted to stay alive was mostly to protect and support their children while they grew up. We don’t think of monkey-wrenchers as devoted family men.

Probably most readers of this book and admirers and emulators of these guys are male. I’ve been reading this kind of book since I was a pre-teen, beginning with Richard Halliburton’s books, which were shelved in the bookcase by my bed. Swimming by moonlight in the reflection pool of the Taj Mahal is a little classier than taking a naked dip in a desert sheep tank, but seems continuous to me. Why would I want to read about it instead of doing it? Because the risks are too high for a female. There is always something they want to take from you. Violence and pregnancy (which men never have to risk) might result.

I’ve known men like Peacock and Abbey in a slightly more than superficial way. I think of Harry Jackson, also on 100% disability from the Vietnam War and finally, with his brain trauma, really unable to go on with his sculpture career. Bob Scriver himself was more of a horseback-rider-offer than a walker-offer, though he was an on-foot hunter in his young years -- not a conservationist until he saw what was happening to the animals. Why did I hang in there with Bob, the same as Peacock’s wives hang in with him as long as they can? Maybe co-dependence: if we can’t live that life -- defiant, risky, outrageous -- maybe we can make it possible for someone to do it who is very close to us, do it second-hand. Such men never have a shortage of volunteers for the next shift of volunteers to be neglected, maybe abused, berated for things they never did, put into danger without warning or recourse. But made exceptional and necessary.

I have some sharp differences from Peacock and Abbey. Maybe the main one is my “no children” rule. I never had the feeling that I could dependably make a living, keep enough equanimity, and maintain discipline. I never had a partner I could depend upon, because prospective partners expected to depend upon me instead. Besides, love means having your heart broken one way or another and it’s hard enough having that happen over a man without losing children as well.

My mother was a walking woman and my father was a walking man -- actually more of a driving man. (He traveled for a living.) Much of their courting time was devoted to hiking, especially the long near-mountain trails that my father the prairie man admired so much. But before marriage my mother, who couldn’t afford a car, walked for many miles over the hills of the southern Willamette Valley in Oregon. I tell the story of how our little family, which traveled by camping in a folding trailer, had spent the night at Silver Falls in Oregon where a trail of maybe five miles goes in a circle behind waterfalls of considerable size. When we woke up, our mother was missing. She had made coffee but her mug was gone. Had something happened? Before we became concerned enough to call authorities, here she came down the trail in her nightgown -- its hem full of mud -- swinging her empty mug. She’d only meant to go a little ways, she said, but then it was such a gorgeous dawn that she just kept on clear around.

Peacock almost never said anything about his mother. Bob Scriver’s relationship with his mother was that she clutched him entirely too tightly. I always had the feeling that my mother might just walk off. What she was trying to “walk off,” I have no idea. Maybe the death of her younger sister in an early auto accident. Maybe the cancer death of her mother. She was secretive about her private life.

It’s easy to be that way with some men -- they don’t inquire into one’s emotions or thoughts, though they are quick to explain their own, and a woman who wants to keep her life to herself can be attracted by that. But maybe a secretive man doesn’t want a woman who writes it all down. On the other hand, if she writes it the way he understands it, maybe he will want that, maybe enough to marry her.

What about Abbey making Peacock into an icon, then insisting on having a relationship with him as a real person. Was he taking advantage? Or was there something vampirish about it? It is part of Peacock’s honor that he just lives with it. The closest he can come to explaining is that there is a father/son dynamic involved. Also, the two of them are blessed with sane friends.

It’s not often that men who have seen extreme violence are eloquent enough to talk about it. “Dispatches,” “Jarhead,” “Blackhawk Down.” The Vietnam lit was slow coming. No one even defined Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome until recently, though we knew about shell shock and so on. (Pull yourself together: walk it off.) Maybe the only person to be so eloquent about PTS it has been Gary Trudeau in his “graphic novel” called “Doonesbury,” but he hasn’t linked it to our war on nature. Probably Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” comes closer. Written by a woman. Peacock reflects here about his feminine side and the erotic jaguar who comes to him in the night. Maybe she’s the one who makes him write.