We paused for lunch below the corniced edge of an east-west ridge and watched wind-blown snow billow from an off-vertical line on old Washington’s northwest face. Reaching into my ditty-bag, I pulled out a tarnished and soot-blackened Svea 123 stove, set it on a flat spot I'd smoothed with the edge of my hand, slipped the small aluminum pot from its wind-screen, splashed white gas onto the top of the brass fuel reservoir, and ignited it to pressurize the tank. Bright orange flames leapt with a whoosh and began consuming the shrinking ring of fuel, converting it into raw heat, internal pressure, and dirty black smoke. When the lapping tongues finally shrank away, I turned the key to open the valve, heard a quick hiss followed by the familiar rhythmic thrum-throb of the vintage Swedish cooker fired up to full-bore. Dropping a lump of corn-snow into the pot, I turned to face Garegin, my friend and greenhorn snowshoeing partner — a precise, if relatively untalented, writer specializing in tenga and senryu, a self-described refugee of conscience from post-Soviet Armenia, an amputee veteran of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, and a shamelessly bold womanizer despite his rapidly advancing years.
“Coffee, Garegin?” I asked. “It’s the good heirloom stuff from Stumptown.”
“Mhm,” the old soldier replied with the corner of his mouth while lighting a Gitanes Maïs by leaning his head down next to the nearly invisible pale blue flame. “Strong as you can make it, okay?”
“Sure thing, old man,” I said. “But don't think for a second that I'm gonna reduce it down to the kind of near-east sludge you make at home.”
Leaning back against my pack, waiting for the snow to turn to water, and for the water to reach a boil, I scanned the nearest slopes of the mountain, noticing the transition points where upright trees gave way to twisted arthritic krummholz which in turn gave way to bare white blankets draped upon an ever-steepening curve of hidden red cinder and weathered scree. I studied the scene until my companion yanked my attention from the scene with characteristic abruptness. Without warning, he threw my half of what he'd brought along for lunch — three strips of teriyaki jerky from Gene’s Meat Market in Mehama, a small bag of mixed nuts with unsulfured fruit, and half a bittersweet chocolate bar — straight across my leg and onto my camera case. Smoothly, despite his disability, he leaned down low to his left, planting a fifth of what looked to be brandy neck-deep in the snow, braced with his one hand, pivoted as if the bottle’s cap were his axis, and fell backward to rest on his wadded-up surplus cagoule. He nodded with his beard to indicate that I should eat, lit up another golden-yellow cigarette, placed it between his lips, and pointed down toward the low roof of the Brandenburg Shelter nestled at the end of a ridge two-hundred feet down and a third of a mile on.
“Have you ever gone down there?” he asked between puffs.
“Sure,” I replied.
“It’s a nice spot to warm up when the weather’s lousy. There’s a woodstove and usually plenty of firewood. But there isn’t much to see. Just a log shed, really. And usually a bunch of older skiers.”
“I'd like to go there after we finish here,” Garegin said, nodding again with his beard, this time in the direction of the steaming pot.
“Anyway, the water's boiling. When the coffee's ready, we’ll season it from that bottle of spirits I brought along. You'll like it, I'm sure. It’s the Vaspurakan distillery's eighteen year old. My nephew Zaven mailed it to me over the holidays. Seems the punter wants to show me what a big shot businessman he’s become back in Yerevan. Every year at Christmas, his presents get more and more flashy. Anyway, he knows the truth. Thirty years ago, I was wiping his shit and changing his nappies.”
“We’ll toast his health then,” I said. “And toast to you not having to change his diapers anymore.”
“Okay okay,” he said, half-chuckling. “Anyway, it’s lucky I don’t have to attend to such needs now. His mess is probably bigger and nastier to clean up these days. And it would surely be harder to change nappies without a right hand to help in the work."
As he finished this thought, I spooned a double measure of finely ground coffee into the epoxy-patched press which I keep in my pack for just such an occasion. Then, with my fingers insulated by a damp woolen glove, I gripped the rim of the metal pot, poured, and dipped my nose to breathe in the aroma of brewing java. Comforted, as ever, by that familiarly homey scent, I placed the plastic lid on the clear cylinder and set it aside on a foam pad. Sitting cross-legged, slowly chewing what felt like a well-past-prime piece of dried apricot, I occupied myself by staring into the vessel, watching countless black flecks of coffee bean as they moved in obedience to constantly shifting thermal currents. Though it seemed a stretch, I read a bit of my own condition into their helpless dance, into the way that each mote seemed caught up in, and compelled by, invisible forces which controlled them completely, but over which they had no control. Caught up in that contemplation, I watched and watched until the brew's ever-increasing opacity hid the movement of the grains completely.
Continuing my line of thought, I found it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see them anymore, I knew what was happening to them. With their vital essence exhausted by currents which now slowed, one-by-one they also slowed, came to a last moment of stillness, and then fell away into impotence. Almost entranced, I felt my foot jerk convulsively, as it might do in bed, when the energy of the body protests the slide of weary consciousness toward the inertia of sleep. In an instant, I was back on the snow, waiting for the coffee to cool a bit. I drew a deep breath, placed my hand on the knob, and forced the plunger down. A minute passed, maybe five. The tough old cripple handed me two enamelware mugs — one after the other — and I filled them just shy of the three-quarter line.
“Do you believe in free will, Garegin?” I asked as he topped off each with two generous glugs of the hard stuff.
“What do you mean by 'free will' precisely?” he asked back. “Are you wanting to know whether I believe in some Grecian idea of fate? Is it that, or are you wondering about something different?”
“I'm not sure” I said, shaking my head.
“Just tell me this — do you think we have the freedom to really choose the direction of our own lives? Can we set our course in whatever direction we want, make whatever choices are needed to follow it, correct ourselves when we find we're no longer going the way we want to? Is it really in our power to dictate our own trajectory, to pick out the most compelling star we see and establish our own orbit around it? Can we live however the hell we want to, wherever the hell we want to, with whoever the hell we want to? Is it like that at all? Or are all of our moves and turns and pirouettes and changes in direction just imposed upon us by some overwhelmingly random and capricious reality?”
“Don’t you have any easier questions you can ask?” he replied with a sharp glance from beneath his thick eyebrows.
“Not right now,” I said.
My friend paused, lowered his beard to his chest, closed his eyes, and took a long drag on what remained of his second smoke. He seemed to rock slightly from side to side. After a few moments, he reached over with his left hand and rubbed at the blue flannel sleeve which once contained his strongest arm, an arm which once ended in a right hand whose five digits had once been the executors of his every decision. It was that hand with which he must have penned his first poems, with which he must have held the tiny warm hands of his four children when they were young, with which he must have pulled the death-trigger ending anonymous enemies as cold and miserable as himself, with which he must have caressed the soft hips and slender necks of each woman to pass through his own black book. The Armenian took another pull on his cigarette, exhaled forcefully, and nodded his head slowly several times. He seemed to me to be considering himself and his own path, unaware that I was still watching. Then, lifting his head, he opened his eyes and looked right at me.
“Okay, it isn’t so simple to answer that question,” he said in a steady and almost restrained tone.
“All I can tell you is what my own experience tells me. And what my experience tells me isn't really an answer at all, but just elementary observations. All the wisdom of my sixty-seven years leads me to three conclusions. The first is that it seems quite clear we don’t have any kind of free will, that we are hopeless creatures yoked to fate. The second is that there are times when we might find ourselves believing that we've free will, when we've not. Lastly, I would say that the only instances in life when we actually did have complete free will, we couldn't use it effectively.”
“Hmm…” he paused. “I wonder if it doesn't all come down to that last?”
“I don’t understand what you just said,” I answered. “Rephrase please, so that I can get it.”
“Well, the way that the first, at least, operates in our lives should be quite plain,” he replied.
“My best example would be that bloody mess out east. I didn’t want to fight in any wars in my life. I damn well didn't decide to leave home and family. There was nothing in me eager to freeze in the mountains for four years. I didn't have any desire cut down a bunch of poor Azeris that I’d never met and had no trouble with. And I didn't freely choose to hang my arm outside of our truck just when that Mukha’s grenade hit. You see, I didn’t choose these things at all. Or at least, I had no real other choice to make. All of that was imposed on this one.”
Garegin crushed the butt of his cigarette on the leg of his knickers, flicked it into the wind with his forefinger, lit another, placed it in his mouth, and muttered on with his explanation.
“And what did I mean by the second thing? It's tough to make sense here. The second observation depends on the truth of the third. As does the first, for that matter. But let me try to speak in a very basic manner, because it's confusing to even think about this subject, let alone try to share such thoughts...
At any rate... okay... in the second circumstance, we find ourselves making some kind of choice which we believe to be independent. We feel that we're making our own decision to do something, start something, end something, go somewhere, stay somewhere, whatever the situation dictates. We make a choice based upon what seems best. We think our decision is free, simple, and unfettered — which is quite the illusion. Truth is, such decisions are totally dependent on our very earliest decisions. They are actually founded upon decisions we made very long ago."
“Have you ever built a house, Farmer?” he asked.
“I’ve helped out in building one,” I said. “Seen it done. Understand the process.”
He laughed and then went on. “Okay, good. Maybe you'll understand this illustration then. You see, these decisions are like the walls of a house."
“The walls of a house! What the hell are you talking about?”
“When you've laid the foundations of a house, and are about to raise the walls, can you make the walls whatever size, shape, location, and dimensions you wish?"
“Of course you decide how to build the walls!” I half-shouted. “Then again, I forget your background, comrade. Maybe your people weren’t allowed such creative liberties back when the Soviets were in power. Maybe you had to have state approval for your wall designs.”
“You miss the point, okay. Of course everyone can pick some things about the wall of the house that they are building. That's not a subject for debate. Every builder gets to decide where the windows go, what color the paint should be. The wall builder makes all kinds of decisions such as these. But a host of decisions leading up to the design and casting of the foundation come long before those wall can be built. Consider that once a house's foundation is hardened and in place, decisions about how the walls can be built can't exceed the limits of that foundation.”
“Ahhhhh…” I said. “So what you’re saying is that sometimes we think we’re making all our choices with total freedom and self-direction, but really, we only have the freedom to decide within the limitations imposed by previous decisions?”
Garegin nodded his head. “Exactly…”
I reached down to my right, grabbed my speckled coffee mug by its bent — nearly crushed — handle, lifted it to my lips, and took a sip of the just-hot-enough brew. I remembered purchasing this particular bag of Stumptown’s Ethiopia Wondo after an evening spent shopping for cribs with Lena. Though our backwoods version was easily twice as intense and syrupy as what we had over the Belmont counter, and was altered in some subtle way by the addition of brandy, the sensations and flavors were still delightful. Every sip was full of bright and tangy notes, flavors reminiscent of some acidic tree fruit that I’d tasted but couldn’t name. After swallowing the last drop, I wiped my face with the cuff of my sweater, and looked back toward my friend.
“So what about that last one?” I started.
“It sounds like your whole theory boils down to that cryptic idea that the only times we actually have some kind of free will, we don't use it right. Am I on track with that assumption? Keep talking, because this is still pretty unclear to me.”
“Mhm…” he mumbled. “That’s right, okay.”
Garegin Aznavour stroked his long dark beard with his fingers, looked down at his boots, then shielded his eyes as he looked up toward the sun, and finally — seeming to find a resting place in the middle — he stared off into the distance back east of Black Butte’s shoulders and finished his explanation.
“All I can tell you is this…. the most lasting decisions we make — the ones which make the most difference to how the story of our lives unfold — are the decisions which we make in a state of relative infancy, at those formative times in our lives when we don't have the perspective from which to make any sound decisions. To use the house illustration again, imagine that, in our infancy, we were each like a blindfolded bricklayer charged with planning, designing, and constructing a lasting foundation for the house of our lives, enduring houses which, at that point in time, were unimaginable to us.
For that brief time, we had unrestrained freedom to decide how to operate within the world, but we had no information about the world, and no idea the impact of the decisions we were making, and of the viewpoints we were forming. You see, those infant bricklayers that we once were did their work thoroughly, did work which we can never reverse. They made the foundations of every future choice in our lives, dictated their borders and dimensions, judged which points needed to be strong and inflexible, chose which points could afford to be weak and yielding. You see, I don't think we ever have free will after that point in time, not really. I believe that no matter whatever else on can say, once the concrete of our life's foundation sets, even our most liberated decisions can't help but stay within its confines.”
With the long silence that followed, I knew he’d finished speaking, that he had no more explanation to give. The grizzled old soldier stood up, stuffed the remnants of our lunch into his battered pre-nylon frame pack, cinched his feet into the straps of his borrowed snowshoes, relit the cigarette that had gone out during all the talking, and motioned for me to follow him toward the shelter. Nodding in assent, I raised myself up, surprised at the stiffness in my thighs, pulled together my own load onto my own back, made my own straps tight, and turned in Garegin's direction. Silently, without another nod, glance or spoken word, I followed his crunching lead even deeper into a sea of virgin snow.
