Lay Me Down

By M. John Fayhee

Editor’s Note: Some fool talked me into helping Ski and SKIING magazines start a book publishing operation called Mountain Sports Press. Their idea was to repurpose content from the magazines into books. I was just back in Colorado after six years in Seattle and seeking employment.

Did I sit down and read through a stack of magazines to see if their idea had any merit?

Nope. I needed a job.

As a slow learner, it took me about two weeks on the job to figure out that magazines and books are as different as a mountain snow shower is to an avalanche.

Magazine content isn’t. It’s mostly fluff—written, edited, and produced to be surrounded by advertising. Definitely not book material.

We did produce a string of fairly spectacular coffee table books on ski areas, but we needed more books with “content.” At the time I was a regular reader of Mountain Gazette, an off-the-wall magazine run by M. John Fayhee. I called him up and suggested that we discuss the possibility of an anthology of the best pieces from the magazine.

John showed up for the first meeting at a Starbucks along I-70 in March. The temperature was around freezing. He had an unkempt beard, and sported a ratty flannel shirt and hiking shorts. He eyed me suspiciously, shook hands, and immediately said, “I fucking hate Starbucks. Corporate greedheads who ruin coffee.”

“I’m fine John, glad to meet you,” I said. And there began our 25-year history of being pretty much polar opposites who appreciated one another’s writing.

We worked on a book called When in Doubt Go Higher for about nine months. While John took credit for my idea, we individually wondered, in his introduction and in my closing letter, why anyone would want to read this wreck of a book. In retrospect, it’s a great read. Perfect for the back of the toilet.

We drifted apart but talked every once in a while, usually about book publishing. John would bitch about book editors/publishers. I would counsel some rot about the water flowing around the rock. Sometimes he’d drop by in Boulder and sometimes I’d drop by in Silver City to tell lies.

Six moths ago I started a Substack notebook called Mountain Passages with a Sunday evening essay on any subject that comes to mind.

No doubt John will claim that this was his idea, but a couple weeks ago, sitting in some grubby Silver City bar with a good chicken sandwich and a really awful glass of wine, I told him I wanted to add other writers to Mountain Passages and asked if he would send me something.

He eyed me suspiciously.

Below find Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Lay Me Down. Phases 3 thru 5 will be posted next Saturday, the 29th.

We can be a little hard on one another, so here is his bio from his latest book without one single blatantly gratuitous comment from me.

M. John Fayhee’s most recent book, “A Long Tangent: Musings by an Old Man & His Young Dog Hiking Every Day for a Year” (Mimbres Press) was a 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award winner.

For twelve years, Fayhee was the editor of the Mountain Gazette. He was a longtime contributing editor at Backpacker magazine. A two-time Colorado Book Awards finalist, his work has appeared in Canoe & Kayak, the High Country News, REI Co-Op Journal, Overland Journal, Islands, Adventure Travel, Men’s Fitness, New Mexico Magazine and many others.

Fayhee has hiked on five continents and has completed the Appalachian, Colorado, Arizona, and Inca trails, as well as the Colorado section of the Continental Divide Trail. Last summer he completed the 100-mile GR20 in Corsica, purported to be the most difficult trail in Europe.

Fayhee is, improbably enough, a New Mexico Humanities Council Scholar.

He lives in New Mexico’s Gila Country with his wife, Gay Gangel-Fayhee.

I am alanstark1@substack.com

Lay Me Down

By M. John Fayhee

“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Angels watch me through the night,
And wake me with the morning light.”

— “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” a much-revised prayer, the earliest form of which was penned by Joseph Addison in 1711

Phase One: Myclonic Jerk

A lingering lower-back problem has mandated in no uncertain terms that I embark upon the tedious process of procuring a new mattress. My initial investigation into the associated commerce has revealed a stunning spin on economic theory as it relates directly to a personal lifestyle equation that has pretty much been writ in stone for many decades: In order to significantly upgrade my bedding situation, I will have to shell out approximately the same amount of money it would cost me to purchase a round-trip ticket to pretty much anywhere that boasts an international airport.

It’s not as though I now lay me down upon a bed of nails. My current mattress was bought from a store named something thematically applicable, like House of Snooze. Maybe not top shelf as far as sleep-system retailers go, but neither was it scored at a yard sale taking place behind a crack house. I think the price surpassed triple digits, but not by much. Still, for the past several years, it has been a decided step up from the beds of my sordid past.

Just the other day, I drove by a hovel over on Georgia Street that I occupied in the early 1980s. That it is still standing shocked me, as it was in a state of near decomposition when it was passed down to me by a young lady — an acquaintance of an acquaintance — who was leaving town in order to broaden her vocational horizons. (She was an aspiring prostitute who found the potential of dirt-poor Silver City somewhat discouraging on both the pecuniary and STD fronts.) The hovel consisted of three small, drafty rooms: a sparse kitchen that did not sport so much as a square millimeter of counter space, a bathroom so small that you almost had to sit crossed-legged on the toilet and a combination living room/bedroom.

The budding hooker, who was trying desperately to find a gullible person to relieve her of a lease that was not due to expire for some months, told me the place was “furnished.” Turns out, the furnishings consisted solely of a wobbly chair and a disintegrating screen door that was mounted on four cinder blocks. The woman considered the latter to be a very versatile — to say nothing of decorative (in an extremely minimalist sort of way) — piece that doubled as both couch and bed.

Since the hovel rented for only $80 a month, I took it. I placed a dissolving three-quarters-length Ensolite sleeping pad I had been given by a Good Samaritan halfway into my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail atop that screen door and called it good. Basically, after having spent the previous several years sleeping on the ground as much as I slept on a bed, I really didn’t give a shit. I had electricity, heat, indoor plumbing, running water and a roof over my head. That was living large for yours truly in those free-floating days.

My hovel quickly became a gathering place for wayward ne’er-do-wells of all stripes.

One of the regular visitors was a young man I shall herein call Willie. Willie was a half-Native American who hailed from a small town adjacent the Mescalero Apache Reservation. He spoke fluent Tex-Mex and enjoyed making intoxicated merry perhaps a bit too much, as we all did. He was ostensibly a college student who, like many of my cohorts, received a fair amount of financial aid with the idea that, eventually, a graduation would ensue, but who, in actuality, usually finished each semester with three incompletes, a D-minus and a dropped class that never was officially dropped because he had forgotten he ever signed up for it in the first place.

As testament to how low our standards were, I learned one day over bong hits that I was something of a hero to Willie. He told me I was the only person he associated with who actually occasionally went to class and actually finished each academic year with verifiable evidence that I was making progress toward a degree. Given that I was anyone’s definition of a desultory student, I was simultaneously flattered and fearful for my future, as well as the future of humankind.

Willie lived a quasi-nomadic life. He couch-surfed. He often slept illegally in the basement of one of the university dormitories. He camped. Occasionally — mostly at the beginning of each semester, when he was flush with student-loan cash that he stood no chance whatsoever of paying back — he would rent a room in a local flophouse.

One day, Willie, who had been squatting in an abandoned shack up near Pinos Altos, delivered to me good news. With cold weather looming, he was moving back into town. And the shack had within it an old mattress that, Willie said, was a step up from my Ensolite-adorned screen door. He scratched some rudimentary directions onto the back of a brown grocery bag that had most recently been used to deliver five-pounds of skanky ditch weed to an unscrupulous local dealer who had a well-earned notorious reputation for repackaging inferior smokeables, applying to them inappropriate over-the-top appellation — bullshit stuff like “Gila Red” and “Mimbres Dynamite” — and selling them at grossly inflated prices.

That very evening, I drove my battered putty-colored ex-UPS Ford van — which came my way in an off-the-books transaction that included a 10-speed bicycle, a 12-string guitar, eight grams of sticky black opium and $200 cash — up the rutted road scratched onto Willie’s hand-drawn map. A few miles up the hill and, sure enough, there was a diminutive cinderblock building matching Willie’s verbal description. It was obviously associated with a long-abandoned mining operation. Probably, it was used to store explosives. It was maybe 12 feet by 12 feet and had only a couple very small windows near the roofline. In place of a door was a brightly colored fake Navajo blanket hanging from two nails.

The inside was surprisingly well tended. While hardly spotless, it was clean in a Thoreau/Walden Pond sort of way. There was a broom leaning against a wall. There was a small table and two chairs. There were several candle holders and an oil lamp. The walls were decorated with badly outdated calendars sporting incongruous pictures of snow-covered mountains.

And, in one corner could be found the goal of my quest: a twin-sized mattress. According to Willie, the shack in which the mattress was located was, much like the dump I called home, bequeathed from resident to resident and had been for many years. Remote and hidden as it was, the only way anyone would learn of its existence was to be told by someone who likely planned to move on. This marked the third time Willie had lived in the shack. Thus, he knew the mattress was an integral part of the residence. This knowledge led to a multi-tiered mental wrestling match on my part.

First, I felt a bit bad about horking a resident fixture from the domicile. After all, the next resident would surely arrive with the expectation of finding a soft landing spot.

Second, I recoiled a bit when I considered the biological back-story of the mattress. A visual reconnoiter did nothing to assuage my concerns regarding the mosaic of stains that covered both sides. There were unidentifiable discolorations mixed with mysterious blotches interspersed with inexplicable smudges commingling with bewildering blemishes. Basically, it looked like a biker-gang-related crime scene that had transpired in a Third World meatpacking plant. It’s fair to say the DNA was highly contaminated.

Yet I was not dissuaded by my uncharacteristic revulsion. Though, given its soiled condition, the mattress was much heavier than I expected, I wrestled it singlehandedly into my van and proceeded directly to my slum, happy as a pig in slop.

Phase Two: Slow Wave

Willie’s relationship with that mattress did not end with my run to the old mining shack he had lately called home.

Willie was what I would have to call a combination of background music and wallpaper. He was often there … at a party, at a cookout, when students gathered in the arroyo next to the Eckles Hall dormitory to get high. He rarely contributed anything besides his presence, which was pleasant in an unoffending sort of way. If he had drugs, which was not often, he would share them enthusiastically. Mostly, though, he was one of those people you didn’t notice was gone till he came back. He would add comments to a conversation but rarely commence discourse. He was physically unobtrusive, maybe five-five, 120 tops. He had deep brown eyes and high cheekbones rising above a badly pockmarked face. He wore a faded serape that looked like it was inherited from Clovis-era ancestors, and he wore it with dignity. His straight, shoulder-length jet-black hair was parted in the middle. He wore a bright-red bandanna around his head. He would have been a perfect subject for an Edwin Curtis photogravure.

Willie seemed like an orphan who made you want to foster him but not adopt him.

Just before Christmas break, three pretty, and pretty wild, women dropped by my Georgia Street hovel for a few days. I had met one of the ladies the previous summer. She had been working as a volunteer ranger at Badlands National Park up in South Dakota when I passed through on my way from Georgia to British Columbia. We hit it off. She and her two traveling companions, all from New York City, were navigating a behemoth drive-away stationwagon to Southern California and, since Silver City was less than an hour off Interstate 10, they detoured so the ranger lady and I might reconnect.

With two unattached vixens in town, friends came out of the woodwork, giving the women a choice of local male material as we planned various daytrips into the Gila National Forest, one of which was a hike to Turkey Creek Hot Springs, one of the most magically beauteous destinations in the entire Mountain Time Zone.

Vixen number-two invited a sorta buddy of mine, who I later learned practiced grand larceny as a sideline. He had lent me a brand-new IBM Selectric typewriter, which was the same kind of machine used by none other than Hunter S. Thompson! The grand larcenist said, since he had graduated, it was gathering dust in a closet and he knew I would put it to good use. At the time, I was working off an old manual Underwood I scored at a local pawnshop for $40, so the thought of upgrading to what was then the apex of typing technology was very appealing. Months later, while cleaning the electric typewriter, I turned it over and there on the bottom was a metal label describing it as property of Western New Mexico University. It had been heisted and I was therefore indirectly complicit in a felony perpetrated upon my alma mater.

I suppose the typewriter thief was using me — and who knows how many other people? — to store his ill-gotten goods until such time as he deemed it safe to fence them. Under cover of darkness, I carried the typewriter, along with an anonymous note explaining the situation, to the campus security office, where I left it on the front step.

When next I ran into my felonious friend, I said I had some bad news: Someone had entered my abode, which was left perpetually unlocked, and made off with the Selectric he had so graciously lent me.

“Well, I think you should pay me for my loss,” he replied lamely.

“First, I need to file a police report,” I said. “As the actual owner, you’ll probably have to fill out some forms.”

The subject was never again broached.

But I did not know about my chum’s dark side as we were planning our foray to Turkey Creek.

The third woman invited Willie, who might have been taking advantage of the fact that she was breathlessly enamored of all things indigenous by embellishing his noble-savage bonafides. (Hell, for all I knew, maybe he was — as he intimated to the impressionable damsel — a direct descendent of both Geronimo and Cochise.) Willie was so stunned, he could scarcely stammer out an enthusiastic affirmative.

So, six of us piled into the behemoth stationwagon, which, according to the drive-away contract, was not to be used for any sort of extracurricular activities and furthermore was really most sincerely not to be taken on unpaved roads, and proceeded to navigate it for a solid hour down a track that was numerous operational levels beneath the description of “unpaved.”

We crossed the Gila River twice with that stationwagon, a decision that caused a certain amount of consternation on the part of the three women whose names were etched upon the drive-away contract. I assured them all would be well. This promise I made despite an applicable experience to the contrary. A scant year prior, with me serving as obstacle spotter while sitting on the hood of an old Datsun sedan, my associates and I got stuck up past the wheel wells while crossing this exact same stretch of the Gila and had to wait till the next morning for help while the car sat in the middle of a flow that was rising with each passing hour. A four-wheel-drive pickup truck eventually came by and got itself stuck helping us, which necessitated waiting several more hours for another four-wheel-drive pickup to happen by and, with all three vehicles spinning tires, grinding gears and maxing out their tachometers, we managed by the skin of our teeth to get safely to high ground.

But these three ladies from New York City did not need to hear that. So, with yours truly at the wheel of a vehicle I had no vested interest in preserving, I recklessly gunned it across the Gila without issue, or at least without issue that concerned me.

It’s a solid 90-minute hike to Turkey Creek Hot Springs from the trailhead, two hours if you are ingesting handfuls of drugs, which the typewriter thief, Willie and I were doing with reckless abandon. The women not only did not partake, but they were all haughtily repulsed by what pretty much everyone I associated with in those days took as a behavioral given.

Oh, well.

The typewriter thief was standoffish during the entire experience. He was a refugee from the suburbs whose only interest in this outing took the form of the lady who had attached herself to him. He was intimidated by the New Mexico wild. He barely knew how to walk, much less hike.

Willie, on the other hand, was having the time of his life. Not only was he in a stunning locale he had never before visited with people whose company he was enjoying immensely, but he had for once in his life been purposefully included on the guest list. And by a buxom beauty who, as she effused on numerous occasions, found him to be one of the sweetest men she had ever met. She seemingly wanted to begin the process of bearing Willie’s children as soon as it was convenient for him to whip his noodle out.

Few things in the world trump contributing to someone else’s well-deserved happiness.

We enjoyed some skinny-dipping in the hot springs, followed by a nice picnic lunch the ladies had prepared. I wandered upstream a few hundred yards to doze in the late-autumn sun. Though the creek was noisy enough that it served as an acoustic buffer, some verbal commotion interrupted my reverie. At first, I thought it was just my compadres messing around. An innocent water fight, perhaps. As my attention focused, however, I could hear my name being called in a tone and at a volume that clearly indicated all was not well, that the cosmos had just taken a big nasty ol’ shit right in the middle of a here-and-now that, scant seconds prior, had been downright agreeable on all levels. My friends were flat the fuck freaking out. Hands were raised above heads like a combination of a Southern Baptist revival and a chainsaw-based horror movie. People were running willy-nilly and bumping into each other. Sandwiches were flying every which way. I dashed back and there lying on the ground was Willie in the midst of the worst grand mal seizure I have to this day ever seen. The dude looked like he had been plugged into a 240-volt electric socket at the same time he had been possessed by a particularly malevolent demon. He was jerking so badly that, even with my full body weight attempting to restrain him, he continued to flail wildly.

Foam spewed forth from his mouth like an unattended high-pressure firehouse running amok and his eyes were rolled back so far, we could not see his pupils, much less his irises. Various important body parts, like, as but one random example, his head, kept banging into proximate boulders. Blood mixed with sand.

This situation was the denotation of “buzzkill.”

The three women were far too busy screaming and running into each other and dropping sandwiches to be of much assistance. And the typewriter thief just stood there, hands limply at his sides, looking lost and forlorn.

My spontaneous plan was to minimize the thrashing-based physiological damage and to try to talk Willie back to our particular skewed version of reality. Eventually he returned. He was dazed and disoriented in the extreme. He wanted to know why I was lying on his chest and why I was telling him everything would be OK in a tone of voice unambiguously suggesting I had no earthly belief anything would ever again be even remotely OK.

This situation was exacerbated by the sobering realization that we had before us an on-foot across rugged terrain, punctuated with many sketchy creek crossings. Willie was wobbly. He needed two of us at his side to make any forward progress. He stumbled often and this sweet kid was fast turning seriously belligerent to the point of combativeness. He simply could not understand what was going on. He had no recollection of his seizure and argued that we were making it up just to embarrass him. One by one, the women fell away exhausted and distraught, and the typewriter thief walked ahead as fast as his pitiful excuse for legs would carry him. I believe I even saw him flapping his arms trying to fly away.

So, for much of the hike out, it was just Willie and I.

It took us four hours to reach the waist-deep Gila River, which we had to traverse to reach the stationwagon. The whole way, Willie fought me. I had to resort to every variation on the cajoling theme I could mentally muster. I encouraged him. I related stories of our various partying escapades. I lied through my teeth by telling him how much fun we would have with those three women once we got back to town. I called him a fucking pussy and disparaged every bad-ass Native American stereotype I could think of. None of it worked individually. All of it worked in the aggregate.

When we finally and thank-godfully made it back to the behemoth stationwagon, we put the seatback down and laid out Willie — who was then, like all of us, soaked from the river crossing. The three women gathered around and took turns talking encouragingly, while the typewriter thief stared glumly out the window. There was little else to do on the first-aid front during those pre-cell phone days

With the last tendrils of dusk hovering above canyon walls almost 4,000 feet deep, I inched that old stationwagon across the Gila, knowing full well that the last thing we needed was to get stuck in the middle of the river. I then drove a bit faster than prudence normally would have dictated down the rutted and serpentine dirt road that would eventually connect us with pavement outside the village of Gila, from where I redlined the car, which, by then, was sporting a few more unidentifiable rattles than it had before our trip commenced 10 hours prior.

Topping out at 100, we made it back to Silver City in less than half an hour. My goal was the emergency room of our local hospital, a long-since-demolished haunted-house-looking facility that had as much a reputation for inexplicable death as it did for restoration of health and well being. First, though, the indignant typewriter thief demanded I take him home. He had been muttering for several hours about how he could not believe what a fucked-up outing he had signed on for and how he would never under any circumstances even consider joining us for another foray, no matter how many unattached lasses we could offer as company. I told him I would drop him off at a street corner that would necessitate him walking maybe 15 blocks. He harrumphed and egressed the stationwagon without saying good-bye or even closing the door.

We were greeted promptly at the emergency entrance by two attendants, one of whom placed Willie, who was by this point bouncing between quiet detachment, overt discombobulation and profanity-laced belligerence, in a wheelchair, and one of whom transcribed my recollection of events. There were numerous questions to both Willie and I regarding types and amounts of illegal intoxicants recently ingested. I was slightly embarrassed that I could not recollect exact pharmacology and specific dosages.

“Many and much” was the best I could do.

When he was asked if had ever experienced a seizure before, Willie mumbled, “I fell down once when I was young.”

The three women returned to my Georgia Street residence. They sped away at first light.

I sat exhausted in the waiting room. Several hours later, a young male doctor came out and reported to me that they had performed several tests, which showed, yes, Willie had indeed suffered a grand mal seizure. The doctor could tell I was spent. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, in all likelihood, Willie would fully recover, but they wanted to keep him for a couple days just to be on the safe side

The doctor then whispered: “You did all the right things under the circumstances. There’s not much else you could have done. He’s lucky to have a friend like you.”

I went to Willie’s room to see how he was doing. He was heavily sedated. He looked comfortable lying, maybe for the first time in his life, on a plush mattress on clean sheets in a sterile roomful of beeping and blinking monitors with an IV bag hanging next to him and a clear hose running to his exposed forearm.

I went back to the hospital two days later. Though there was little more they could do, the doctor was reluctant to release Willie, since he apparently had no home address and no one to look after him.

“He can stay at my place till he gets better,” I heard myself saying.

Willie rested on that same disgusting mattress I had liberated from the old mining hut for the better part of a week. His nocturnal agitation was so intense, I slept out in the backyard. One morning, when I went inside, he was gone. No note. No Nothing. Just gone.

I did not see Willie for several months. As buds began appearing on the elms lining the streets of Silver City’s historic district, he stopped by out of the blue, not quite acting as though nothing had transpired that day along Turkey Creek, but almost. We smoked a joint he brought with him, talked about upcoming final examinations — which I would be halfheartedly taking and he, once again, would be missing. A few other friends came and went, but Willie extended his visit, apparently purposefully.

“Do you ever hear from those women?” he asked, casually, once we were alone.

“Nah. Seemed like that ship sailed.”

“Sorry I fell down that day,” he said, staring stoically straight ahead.

“You feeling better?”

“I don’t know.”

There was an awkward silence.

“

When I woke up and you were holding me down and calling my name, I thought you were an angel,” Willie said. “Your head was glowing and you had wings.”

I couldn’t for the life of me figure how he made me out to be a member in good stead of the heavenly host. Maybe the sun was at my back, illuminating my unkempt locks. And maybe two of our cohorts were standing behind me in such a way that their bodies appeared to a man lying on his back emerging incrementally from a seizure as feathery appendages.

Either way, it marked the first time in my devilish existence I had ever been mistaken for a divine being.

After another long silence, Willie asked: “That mattress still working out?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “I appreciate you pointing me toward it.”

And, with those few allusive sentences, we both understood my mattress-based debt to Willie had been paid in full, with interest duly accrued.

I spent the summer working as a night watchman on a paddle-wheeler on the Mississippi River. Midway through the next fall semester, I realized I had not seen Willie since I returned from the humid hell of the Big Muddy. No one seemed to know what had become of him. To this day, I have heard nary a syllable about his whereabouts or his condition.

I hope he has been resting comfortably in the interim, no matter his circumstances.

END

Editor’s endnote: The second half of Lay Me Down will be posted on Mountain Passages next Saturday, March 29th at 6pm MDT.

Order John’s book from from your local independent bookstore or any of the usual suspects, M. John Fayhee, A Long Tangent: Musings by an Old Man & His Young Dog Hiking Every Day for a Year” (Mimbres Press), ISBN 978-1-958870-08-2, paperback. It’s a good read. Buy it.

If you would like to comment on John’s essay or just say hi, send a note to alanbearstark@gmail.com and I’ll pass the note along to John.

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