Homage To Jaffrey
I went up and paid my respects to P.J. O’Rourke yesterday. Sort of. He didn’t even know I was in his town, Jaffrey, N.H.* I was wondering as I drove from south of Boston via 93, cutting across 495 to 3 to get off on the Amherst-Milford stretch of 101A, if it bothered him how generic that heavily strip-malled zone has become or if he’s glad his bucolic neighbors have a choice between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. Jaffrey, meanwhile, 20 miles or so deeper into the woods, has become quaint in a different way than it used to be, dolled up, not like I remember it at all from maybe 18 years ago, the last time I went up Monadnock.
I was single, didn’t even know my wife then. Last blast of that old life, with my buddy John, a wild-eyed sheepshagger from Derbyshire, U.K. I recall we strayed off the path on the way down and had to bushwhack a while, which is pretty lame on Monadnock’s beaten paths but possible when you are about 30 and generally given to crashing through without paying much attention to where you are going.
This time I was with my 13-year-old son, on our way to climb his first mountain.
“You know, P.J. O’Rourke lives in this town. You know who P.J. O’Rourke is?”"
“He wrote ‘Holidays in Hell.’”
God, I love that kid. We’ve been running together this summer, me getting back into shape, him getting seriously into shape for the first time, and the mountain was the next phase of that project, him building up and me building back. Talking all the time. He doesn’t forget a thing, absorbs it all, so I end up telling him, you know, I rattle on, try to tell you what I know about the world. But this is going to be your world to live in, and you’ll need to make your own mind up about it.
I actually know P.J. O’Rourke, sort of, having met him once and had my existence acknowledged by him in a manner that suggested he actually had heard my name before. I assume he was just being polite. It was an Iraq thing, and we were at a book-reading that was more like a memorial service for a mutual friend. I actually have P.J. O’Rourke’s wife’s email, which he offered because he said he doesn’t do email, though I suspect it also has the benefit of keeping people at arm’s length, an objective I fully appreciate. Of course I didn’t contact him to say, “I’m coming to your town.” The man at last report was dealing with the cruel indignity of cancer of the ass, and besides, who wants to be saddled with some extraneous erstwhile passing acquaintance/total stranger on a Sunday afternoon? I know I wouldn’t.
So my son and I climbed the mountain, which is purported to be the most-climbed mountain in the world, its advocates claiming it has surpassed what I figured was the most climbed, Mount Fuji, ever since Fuji got an auto road. Anyway, it was great. Scrambling up tumbledown rocks, emerging above the treeline, placing rocks on the cairns and reaching the wide-open, windswept peak, where we ate and lounged a bit on a sheltered sloping rock face looking north. The kid loved it, which means we’ll be doing more of that, advancing to the peaks of the White Mountains farther north in New Hampshire. Nothing in this world quite like giving your kid a mountain. Reminds me what I’m supposed to be glad about, the times I wasn’t killed when I expected to be.
(Sounds stupid, but it actually can take a while to figure that out: Why was I supposed to be glad I wasn’t killed? Of course I was glad to make it home with my family, but there had to be more to it than just being around, dropped back into this life like any other work-a-day suburban dad who has to mow the lawn every week. Oh yeah. I had to give my kid a mountain.)
Doing that in O’Rourke’s town was great, too. He has been an inspiration, that it is possible to be earnestly irreverent, look at the impossible, sometimes tragic absurdities of this world, and respond with the “What the fuck?” their existence deserves instead of whining and head-tilting (to steal an image from Blair), and to recognize that the right thing to do isn’t necessarily the easy self-congratulatory feel-good thing. Which is why I’m so glad to find I’m apparently on the same page with P.J. what to do about global warming. Where the right thing to do is in fact the easy feel-good thing. Burn the damned oil up, as O’Rourke reportedly advocates in his new book. Want to revive the economy, shore up the auto industry, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, all that? I’ve been advocating a V8 in every driveway. By the time we’re done with the oil, don’t worry, they’ll have figured out another way to generate respectable amounts of horsepower.
Haven’t read his latest, but it doesn’t sound like he has much respect for Priuses or people who want you to think they are better people because they drive them: Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be — With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac … of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn.
Other O’Rourke classics, if you have managed to get through life without reading any:
Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
* UPDATE: Apparently I’m behind the curve. O’Rourke reportedly now lives in Sharon, N.H., which was carved half off of Jaffrey, half off of Peterborough at some point in the distant past. Well, a few years back, at that reading/memorial service, I could have sworn he said Jaffrey. Maybe he said, “by Jaffrey.” Maybe that’s like the wife’s email, another way to keep the adoring masses at arm’s length.
Topics: everything
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:48 am on Monday, August 10, 2009
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