Hoh River Boy (r) and His Friend Gary "Makkor" Cox (l) in 1976 at the Hoh Ranger Station -- Photo by Mary Lou Hanify
Washington Rebel is lucky to have as one of its contributors Hoh River Boy, author of WR's first two articles, Remembering Bud Hanify and The Speech of the Grail -- as well as the bloke who interviewed me! I was able to corner him at one of his favorite haunts the other day. Over 20 or 30 cups of real black coffee, we had a leisurely conversation, the Pacific Northwest way. I had lots of questions.
IC What's your book about?
HRB It's about being "born" in the Hoh Rain Forest in the 1970s. A variety of forces conspired to drop my family into the center of rain-shrouded isolation, armed only with books, and an Irish love of conversation. No television; very infrequent radio reception, and then only late at night, when the cloud cover was just right. Something came alive inside me within the container of that isolation, that darkness, a something that has instructed me throughout my life. It's about spiritual sanctuary, and how badly sanctuary is needed in our crazed modern environment. It's also about my older self trying to make his way back to the "hearth." I guess you could say the book is about locating that sanctuary in the topography of the soul.
IC I know the "hearth" is at the center of the story. But first, tell me about writing
HRB Not much to tell. I was always more a reader than a writer. My mother was a writer; her grandfather Morehead bought and sold newspapers his entire professional life, from Colorado to Washington. Writing was all I ever heard about from my mother, but it was a madness that has never fully possessed me, even now. I worked on the school newspaper at Forks High School and took journalism courses in college, but I really didn't work very hard at writing. It wasn't until 1979 that I wrote my first logging story.
IC Were you logging then?
HRB Setting chokers. My first logging job was setting chokers 12 hours a day under a balloon.
IC A balloon!
HRB A balloon. The Japanese set that up to log with less of an impact on the environment.
IC What was that like?
HRB (excitedly) Well, I was scared! That thing flew us up the ridge and "dropped" us off. Shrinkwraps your testicles.
IC I've read that piece of writing. It's pretty good. What finally possessed you to write it?
HRB Beginning in the early 90s I was having a great many disturbing dreams. They were so disturbing, I even tried Jungian therapy. It wasn't therapy I needed. What I needed to do was write.
IC How did you figure that out?
HRB Have to read the book!
IC What do you mean to do with the other chapters you've written?
HRB I'm open to publishing them, but the conditions have to be right.
IC 'Splain.
HRB Well, I'm not certain the average American reader can handle it. Let's start with reading levels. Saul Bellow, in his introduction to Closing of the American Mind, discussed how superficial and finicky the American reader is. What they want is a gum wrapper with a binding. They don't want to be challenged, which is a pity. Bellow said, "There are certain things people should know if they are to read books at all." Unfortunately, most Americans are grossly uneducated. People who use "This Sux" and "fuck" for every manner of expression don't love language. In fact, they don't love. Reading is love, because its about loving the human mind, the human heart, human speech. If you're not interested in a good book, you're not very interesting. Most people I know are trying to escape through booze and drugs and maybe reading! I'm of the opinion that reading beyond your current level is what makes you human. Always reading beyond your current level. Therefore, dumbing down my writing doesn't suit my purpose.
IC That's an interesting take. What are some of the other reasons you've been reluctant to publish?
HRB What Neo-Neocon called "the norming of PC thinking." Out of all the things I've seen in my life, Political Correctness is the most abhorrent -- the most tyrannical. The whole time I was writing the book, I had to shave off the parts that I knew wouldn't pass PC muster. Unfortunately, I have been held hostage to what I call the Catechism of the Left in many, many social and professional situations. If you want to find work -- presumably also if you want to get published -- you have bow to the overwhelming intolerance of the Left. I won't do that. I won't do that for anyone.
IC Your grandfather got his first job with the National Park Service as a result of silent tyranny. Can you tell us about that?
HRB Sure. My grandfather was working for the United States Forest Service out of Kalispel. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, someone assumed -- incorrectly -- that my grandfather was a Republican. He was fired from his job! He petitioned the Montana governor, who made a call to the feds. They couldn't get my grandfather's job back. It had been filled. The governor made some more calls and got my grandfather a job with the Park Service. That's how my family got started with the Park Service.
My grandfather came home in the middle of the depression having been fired from his job. He was a loyal Democrat his whole life, even after that experience. My father never forgave Roosevelt. I grew up in a household where the Democratic Party was regarded as the equivalent of the Mob, although, as I frequently tell people, "both sets of my grandparents were Democrat", which is true. My father saw through them. He never forgot the pain caused by 1930s PC! One of the things we heard about and talked about around our house was the Hatch Act, passed in 1940 to prevent the kind of political retaliation used aginst my grandfather.
IC In your book you make an effort to describe the volatile political climate of the 1970s, but you barely mention Watergate, the biggest event of that time.
HRB Watergate was a constant hum, like a television left on -- they used to hum, you know! I had no real dog in that race, and my book isn't overtly political. It's politically incorrect, and leads down paths you wouldn't recognize if you're being partisan. My book makes no attempt to gloss over life with little pretties. I tell it like it was on the Olympic Peninsula in the 1970s. In fact, I really had to work hard to scrub the 'f' word out, because it's offensive, but I kept in many details that will send self-described "liberals" off to see their shrinks.
IC Example?
HRB My hometown of Port Angeles was a shipping town. Like all shipping towns, it was extremely busy during World War II -- in this case in the Pacific war effort. When I was growing up, most of the World War II vets said "Japs." Looking back, I never experienced that as hateful. I never heard anyone curse the Japanese, or refer to them as less than human. Remember, these were people who had engaged the Japanese in battle 20 years earlier. People said "Japs", but I didn't experience it as hateful. It was used approximately the same way you would use a nickname. So, if I say "Jap" in my logging story, does that make me a racist? Things like that. How do you be accurate without offending someone judging you retrospectively? If I use contemporary PC, I have to subtract from the story.
IC You make reference to a form of Political Correctness being used to persecute your father. Is that accurate?
HRB It's a mixture. Political correctness, as we think of it, took shape in the Seventies. First, if you defended our presence in Vietnam, you were attacked viciously. As a teenager, I watched what the Left did to people if you disagreed with them. There was no attempt to reason through the pros and cons. It was shockingly hateful, vicious.
Second, the environmental movement. Every decade the Left has various "truths" which can't be contradicted, except under penalty of personal attack. Why is that? Interesting question, isn't it?
What my Dad stood for, and what he was attacked for, was the pre-Sixties can-do world. He judged you by your work ethic and your principles, not your "education." This was a threat to the Brahmanic class in the Park Service, the kids who, like me, were born after the war and who expected everything they asked for to be delivered, versus my father's generation who were grateful if they had a peaceful, prosperous week. Certain individuals went out of their way to hurt him because they saw him as a threat to their centralized control. I got quite an education in the difference between Principal and personality, a man versus the egotists. I have never forgotten those lessons. It is the one thing I most love about my Dad. He was a man. He was principled!
IC Tell us about the Hoh Rain Forest.
HRB It's at the center of my heritage. My grandfather Hanify's parents were Irish immigrants. For whatever reasons, he was drawn there. He worked on the Hoh road the summer of 1940, and used to hike up to Blue Glacier in his Oxfords. He was quite nearly killed blowing rock on the High Divide trail. My Dad strung wire there before and after World War II. It was his first choice of destinations when offered the position of Chief Ranger in 1971. For whatever reason, the place was synonymous with my family. Folks back then called it "Hanify National Park."
Not long after we arrived there, I became aware that I had been drawn to the place. By what?
Bud Hanify
IC Tell us what it was like growing up with Bud Hanify.
HRB It's a book!
You could say -- I do say -- my father was born for the task of stewardship in the Olympic National Park. His father was a first-generation Irishman who quit the Catholic Church to become a Mason, broke horses for the U.S. Army in World War I, homesteaded in southeastern Montana, and went to work building roads and trails for the Olympic National Park when it was created in 1938. He also stayed married to the same woman till he died, and raised three daughters and one son. My father started work for ONP in 1940 as a lineman. When we were kids growing up, many of the phone lines he helped string were still in operation, which was a trip. A person couldn't help but combine family history and Park history into a single psychic unit, embodied as my Old Dad. You have to forgive me if I tell you that the Hoh Rain Forest is "mine"!
Two outstanding features about my Dad, among many: one is, he studied Drama at college before World War II. The other is something he taught us kids: everything that can be known about human nature can be learned by studying the Bible and Shakespeare. He was an astute reader of literature and the human heart, an astute soul. I believe he was objectively correct in that assessment, though I would add the Greeks to his potion.
What my father was saying was very important. At some level his Irish blood understood that Shakespeare's voice was the voice of Psyche herself, what some have called the White Goddess. The Bible, on the other hand, was an unsparing look at human sin, depravity, and greatness. In other words, it tells the politically incorrect truth about man.
My Dad was a real American, not a shrill substitute like Sean Hannity, for example. If you want to feel my Dad's soul, lock yourself up, put on River Dance and Chieftains 7 and read Sand County Almanac and Ordeal of Change. After a week or so of daily treatments, you'll be a Hanify. There are worse fates. Certainly you'll be the better for it.
Writing the book helped me clarify a very important point: many of my Dad's friends worked "CC" crews in Port Angeles in the late 1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, they went off to War, then they came home! All of us kids who were lucky enough to have these guys as fathers knew a security I can't begin to describe. One of the reasons, in fact, that I've chosen to not have children is that I strongly dislike modern American society. If people were what I knew growing up, I would want kids, but they're not, so I don't. I honestly don't like my country very much. I love it, but I don't like it.
IC 'Dislike' is a strong word. You're sure you're not mistaken?
HRB Positive! Modern Americans are trashing their heritage. Remember this quote from Bill Cosby?
Five or six different children -- same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t who this is. It might be your grandmother. I’m telling you, they’re young enough. Hey, you have a baby when you’re twelve. Your baby turns thirteen and has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother. By the time you’re twelve, you could have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I’m just predicting.
Many people said these remarks applied only to black Americans, but it's an accurate description of America. And it's absolutely dismal. Dismal, and quite dangerous.
As Dr. Zero said recently, How Do We Fix This?
I'm sayin', 'We don't.' We're dead meat.
IC Tell us about your chicken.
HRB The original PC!
I brought my pet chicken out from our "pickle ranch" west of Port Angeles when we moved to the Hoh. We also had a dog, Shamrock, and a cat, Tiger. We also had two old pack horses that my Dad rescued from the fox farm. Hanifys have had the reputation for generations of treating animals like humans. None of us kids can stand to see an animal suffer. Period. And many animals are sharper companions than the average shouting American I see every day!
IC Let's change subjects a bit. You discuss at length the history and the significance of the Grail in your book. What do you know about it? How did you get interested in it?
HRB The Grail is one of the central mysteries of the Western Matrix. Is it An Object, A Ritual, or a Place? The single best book on the subject is At the Table of the Grail. The most fascinating recent book on the Grail is Patrice Chaplin's City of Secrets. What most people don't realize is that there is a complex and very intelligent esoteric history in the West, at the center of which the Grail pulsates.
IC Why is that important to us?
HRB Right now the West is dying. I mean that literally. We're dying. For the clueless "liberal", the answer to all prayers is always a greater state. Ironically, calls for a greater state belie the weakness that will kill us all. What do you get from a stronger state that is better than stronger character, strong family, strong committment to a useful life? What do you get from forced "oneness", forced equality? You get a ruling class protected by the weapons of the State, and a lot of insects who must obey, or be crushed.
Conservatives haven't figured out how to package cultural transmission as an attractive option. The result is an "enlightened" culture where "progressives" continually lecture us that All is One, and that everyone is important, and that communal prayer lifts us up to our greater Hope, et cetera, but Abortion is the national ritual and hating conservatives is at the center of "thinking." In other words, the United States has suffered a psychotic breakdown in that the functions of character development have been projected onto outside causes. The adults -- the conservatives -- haven't figured out a remedy to save the adolescent "liberal" from killing the rest of us. Literally our "leaders" are graying children, our society at risk from a Lord of the Flies syndrome. The people currently rising to the top in our society are thugs, not leaders. Well-meaning people can't see the truth! It's very, very scary. The road back will be via conservatism, i.e., Heritage! The West must cherish its Heritage or perish! Cherish or Perish!
The Grail likely holds the answer to the problem. Why? Because it tells the truth about life: for love to thrive you need cultural transmission, i.e., conservation, conservatism. The Facts of Life are Conservative. For the individual to thrive you need classical liberalism, i.e., the representative Republic, of which America is the outstanding example, the Beacon on the Hill. The Grail is both: on the one hand, it contains the mystery of the West, i.e., a proud cultural transmission; and, on the other hand, it bids us to a future wholeness, one that goes beyond our current divisions. Strangely, he who champions the Grail must set out on a lonely Quest that may well take his life. In doing so, he defends innocence, modesty, and truth, principles which people today reject at their peril! Principles, not words! The Grail Knight -- or Lady -- does not shy away from cultivating his or her own Force of Character, but sees it as a duty to do so. He chooses to master himself, as opposed to manipulating others. And he is close to the land! True conservatism is anchored in land, family, tradition, and nation. We'd best get those things back, or we're doomed.
Here begin the terrors, here begin the marvels . . . .
It was Linda Sussman who figured out what is likely the initiatory pattern of Eschenbach's Parzival, i.e., speech, and by speech she doesn't mean the rude babble of our time. She means attentive listening -- real learning -- is at the heart of liberation and culture, not placards, protests and condemnations. Finally, the Grail is esoteric Christianity, a subject which requires at least a lifetime of study.
IC What's your favorite memory of the Hoh Rain Forest?
HRB There are too many! One of the things that has changed is that more people visit the Hoh now than before. In my time, the place pretty much shut down after Labor Day. I was able to walk around the place most every night in complete solitude -- alone except for the animals. As you know, those experiences were what I used for medicine: relief from school, relief from my own inner demons.
IC Your book address the issue of demons.
HRB Absolutely! I was making a lot of bad choices, as were many people at that time. As it turns out, my inner Hoh Rain Forest came to my aid. I'm still learning now!
IC All your stories swing back to the living room at the Hoh Rain Forest. Is that your Grail?
HRB You're not as dumb as you look. And that's saying something!
IC Our readers would like to know how the living room at the Hoh became your Grail.
HRB My mother was a writer; my father a learned man, the way American males educated themselves prior to World War II: they polished their grammar, their grasp of history, and trained themselves to recognize life's questions while they polished their characters with the earmarks of civility -- another casualty of modern recklessness. This is hard for us to believe now, because, with characteristic superficiality, we equate "education" with college, but in the generations before men finished school, the good ones like my father propelled themselves forward with books and "manliness" -- a word you can't use now without derision! Our living room was a magnet for good conversation, a spur to further reading, and organic research. Dinner, coffee and conversation woke my soul up. It marks me to this day. People know there is something different about me. What is it?
It's the Grail.
None of that could have happened unless I was taken to the Sanctuary of my youth, the Hoh Rain Forest; none of it would have happened except that my Dad understood human individuals were duty-bound to master themselves. Those foundations were transmitted to me. I'm a very lucky man. I wish more people could share in that communion.
IC Why can't they?
HRB Too busy making excuses! True learning means conquering your laziness and sharpening your mind. A person excusing themselves from duty is a child, not a man. As Eliphas Levi said, you must become "a burning question mark"! For the average lump, answers are plentiful, and aggressively imposed. Watch Oprah for five minutes and you'll get my drift. The giggling, the self-righteous posturing, on shows like The View are the temper of our time.
Modesty is the Capstone Over All the Virtues
IC Did you have any supernatural experiences at the Hoh?
HRB As a matter of fact, my sisters and I all did to varying degrees, but I wouldn't describe it that way, exactly. What I would say is, the Inner Silence took over.
IC Whoa!
HRB (Laughing) In answer to your question, not long after we moved to the Hoh I had a dream that I thought was an out-of-body experience. I later learned it was an instance of remote viewing.
In retrospect, specific instances weren't as important as the processes that took over. We had no electronic stimulation, other than the stereo. Days and days of a grand silent forest, reading, and contemplation, produced an interior result that is my most prized possession. I cherish it above all other features of my life. Literally, if I died today, that would be okay, because I had six years of sanctuary in the Hoh Rain Forest. I was born there! To know what I knew in my youth at the Hoh Rain Forest was more than enough compensation. I'm satisfied!
IC You mentioned earlier that you were drawn there. Can you tell us more about that?
HRB I remember in particular crossing the big pond by the road when it was quite nearly pitch black one winter evening, after school. There were only a handfull of people living in the residential area at the time, so we had the Hoh Forest to ourselves. As I balanced and hopped aboard logs to avoid getting wet I became aware -- as if I were noticing a guest for the first time -- that a personality accompanied my travels. What was it? Who was it?
IC Did you ever figure it out?
HRB Not precisely, but I can tell you She is always nearby.
IC What is the significance of Modesty?
HRB Only Modesty unlocks the door to the Grail. Only Modesty!
IC I noticed in your book dreams figure very prominently. Why is that?
HRB I was very fortunate to have been instructed in dreamtime since before I started school. Most people don't realize it, but dreams are the Road of Light that bridges past and future, Psyche and Soma, God and Soul. I received my instruction from an Inner Source. In fact, if you begin to pay attention to dreams, you receive the same instruction!
You know something? The West is probably the greatest dream repository of the World. Celts, Brits, American Indians, Greeks, Romans, all came here, all were dreamers. You should ask yourself, 'Why have we replaced dreaming with tv?', particularly since we're composed of concentrated dream genes!
Meditate on that question for a month or so, and watch what happens.
IC When can we expect the book?
HRB Soon!
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