Free Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac

forestry careerists they are very religiously jealous of “his” and “my” fire, as tho—“Gene are you there?” says Howard on Lookout Mountain, relaying a message from the Skagit crew foreman who is standing under the fire with a walkie-talkie and the men staring at the steep inaccessible slide it’s on—“almost perpendicular—Ah How 4, he says that you might get down from the top, it would probably be a rope job and couldnt pack in what you needed—”—“Okay,” sighs O’Hara, “tell him to stand by—How 33 from 4”—“33”—“Has McCarthy got out the airport yet?” (McCarthy and the bigwig Forest Supervisor are flying over the fire), 33 has to call the airport to see—“How one from 33”—repeats four times—“Back to How four, I cant seem to get a hold of the airport”—“Okay, thank you”—But turns out McCarthy is in the Bellingham office or at home, apparently not much concerned yet because it isnt his fire—Sighing O’Hara, a sweet man, never a harsh word (unlike bossy cold-eyed Gehrke), I think if I should find a fire in this crucial hour I should have to preamble my announcement with “Hate to pile sorrows on you—” Meanwhile nature innocently burns, it’s only nature burning nature—Myself I sit eating my Kraft Cheese Noodle dinner and drinking strong black coffee and watching the smoke 22 miles away and listening to the radio—Only got three weeks to go and I’m off to Mexico—At six o’clock in the still hot sun but high wind the plane sneaks up on me, calling me, “We’re about to drop your batteries,” I go out and wave, they wave back like Lindbergh in their monoplane and turn around and make a run over my ridge dropping a miraculous bundle from heaven which whips out in a burlap parachute and goes sailing sailing far over the target (high wind) and as I watch it gulping I see it’s going to go clear over the ridge and down the 1500-foot Lightning Gorge but a lordly little fir captures the shrouds and the heavy bundle hangs on the cliff side—I put on my empty rucksack after finishing the dishes and hike down, find the stuff, very heavy, put it in my rucksack, cutting shrouds and tapes and sweating and slipping in the pebbles, and with the rolled-up parachute under my arm lugubriously I labor on back up the ridge to my lovely little shack—in two minutes my sweat’s gone and it’s done—I look at the distant fires in distant mountains and see the little imaginary blossoms of sight discussed in the Surangama Sutra whereby I know it’s all an ephemeral dream of sensation—What earthly use to know this? What earthly use is anything?
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    And that is precisely what maya means, it means we’re being fooled into believing in the reality of the feeling of the show of things—Maya in Sanskrit, it means wile —And why do we go on being fooled even when we know it?—Because of the energy of our habit and we hand it down from chromosome to chromosome to our children but even when the last living thing on earth is sucking at the last drop of water at the base of equatorial ice fields the energy of the habit of Maya will be in the world, embued right in rock and scale—What rock and scale? There are none there, none now, none ever were—The simplest truth in the world is beyond our reach because of its complete simplicity, i.e., its pure nothingness—There are no awakeners and no meanings—Even if suddenly 400 naked Nagas came solemn tromping over the ridge here and say to me “We have been told the Buddha was to be found on this mountaintop—we have walked many countries, many years, to get here—are you alone here?”—“Yes”—“Then you are the Buddha” and all 400 of em prostrate and adore, and I sit suddenly