North of the white dunes and the Poison Hills and the alkali flats created by outwash from canyons with names like Lost Man and Dead Man is the Malpais — the Valley of Fires — a vast upflow of black lava flung from the Abyss as Lucifer was thrown into it. It’s a land of jagged, indurate rock where few people go and no one can easefully live. In another century, a fellow said of it, “Out there the only critters sleeping with both eyes closed are dead.” Not a place for the visually impaired.
Out that way too are the Oscura Mountains standing above the northern limit of the Jornada del Muerto. And yet another terminus is there, this one the end of the preatomic age, an infernal locus of god-awful name, Trinity, where one early morning in July 1945, to use the phrase of the time, “the sun rose in the west” to start humankind on its greatest journey of death when gentlemen scientists down from Los Alamos exploded the first-ever nuclear weapon. But Trinity? Trinity of what? Detonation, destruction, devastation? Degeneration, decivilization, devolution? Depravity, deformity, destiny?
The names from that territory seemed in mortal combat at a kind of toponymic Armageddon: mountains of the Sacrament and of an apostle against mountains of gloom overlooking a dead man’s journey. And eastward lay a “bad country” leading to an unholy trinity of demonics of damnation and darkness, where to sleep deeply is to die.
The old residents, the Apaches, also had names for this desert, but I don’t know what they were; in dust devils spinning downwind, the Mescalero listened for the twistings to speak, but I don’t know what they said. I have heard an elder tell of the lake under the sands and how it waits for the time of man to pass so it can rise once again, emerge into the light, cleansed and pure and holding life, its waters beneath a sky looking down on a land devoid of two-leggeds who take all they don’t desecrate. The promise of crystal water appears today in the rosemary mint (tastes like both) and in lemonade bush (from citruslike berries comes a beverage), each plant a result of natural alchemies transmuting salt and alkali into sugar and spice.
The afternoon following my first evening (appropriate to an Armageddon, the date was 6-6-06, the Beast of Revelations), I was up in the hills north of Alamogordo, up at La Luz — another name of almost unbelievable irony and applicability, as if the Hispanic viejos were clairvoyant, people not of impaired vision but prevision. There a man told me as we looked across the long valley, “Ask in Alamogordo what goes on at the military base, and you’ll hear about cutting-edge weapons of lasers and particle beams and neutrons and microwaves. Things to kill you or just give you a bad sunburn. Stealth technology. I don’t know what the truth is, but I know I’ve seen a blinding beam of light fired the length of the valley right toward the Oscuras. And I believe this — we create monsters down there.” Weaponry of luminescence in a land where residents say the sun shines three-hundred-twenty days a year (and on one of them, it rose in the west). La Luz.
The night was dark as all get-out when I stopped the car to stumble my way toward the pallid glow of a shabby house trailer, one of the stumbles noisy enough (or maybe it was my cussword) to bring out the hounds of Hell, a pair of charging mongrel pit bulls. I couldn’t see the dust the dogs were raising, but I could smell it. A guttural voice cursed the curs into fanged growls, and it inquired about my approach with the indirection of “Are you one of them county morons?” I said I was the moron looking for Jean Ingold’s trailer. “Next one north!” — the punctuation provided by an empty beer can pitched at the once-again-barking mutts that put one into a satisfying yelp.
I fumbled forward toward a strip of thin pines, shadows against the sky, dimly illuminated by the dimmest of light from a dim window in a dimmed house trailer. I called her name and went to the screen door, and there she stood, her hair freshly washed and in rollers, and she, slender, a small lark, the single bulb inside outlining her shape through a nightie worn down to sheerness, more a long veil than a gown, and her voice in surprise, “I thought you were arriving tomorrow. I go to bed at nine in the warm weather, but I’m glad you made it.” Opening the door, holding it for me — “Maybe you can help me move my cot outside. I think it’s too warm tonight to sleep in here.” So we moved it. Later, she would lie down near the pines, covering herself with only a thin sheet, and she would watch the desert sky slip away over the mountains until she too slipped away into sleep.
With no place to sit under the trees and but a single chair in her single room, she offered it to me while she sat on the floor, her legs under her like a child at a storytelling. Jean Shirer Ingold was eighteen months shy of seventy, and she watched me with side-glances, speaking as her eyes searched the walls for what to talk about, and she gave frequent quick chuckles to things she said, although a few of her sentences had a somber cast to them. She was both sprightly and spritely.
For a decade, as she’d read through books I’ve written, she sent me letters — typewritten and single-spaced on both sides of the thin paper, key topics underlined for speedy comprehension, margins frequently annotated in pen with additional clarifying thoughts. Sometimes she wrote a short review of a book, usually one about human survival and what it will require, and sometimes she included relevant apothegms, often an adage, such as Gandhi’s We must be the change we wish to see in the world, from a talk she’d given or heard at the Unitarian Fellowship.
Letters from her differed from many that I receive. Here’s the first sentence from one of them: “Heat-Moon, Carrizozo’s lava beds are one place I should have worn thicker-soled shoes.” Another: “Heat-Moon, have I ever told you about Andre, who worked for a pesticide company?” For perspective, consider her opening sentences against these from other readers across the country: “Dear WLH-M, forgive this long letter for taking up your time, but I have the odd habit of reading your books.” Or “Dear Author Least Heat-Moon: I’m eager for your next book, so please hurry up with it. I got your last book at a garage sale for a dime — and you know how long it takes before things get to a garage sale.” While I’m sharing these, I’ll not resist one more: “Dear Mr. Heat-Moon, I found your book about traveling around America to be most well-written, but what have you done since Travels with Charley?”
Ingold’s sentences were precisely set down, each typographic misstroke from her portable Smith Corona neatly painted over and restruck. In ten years of her letters, I found but a single misspelled word; once she apologized for typing on only one side of excessively translucent paper, and another missive gave apology for a postal clerk who “tilted” the stamps on a large envelope containing a small packet of mesquite blossoms she had gathered and dried for use as a condiment. I should try them, perhaps on a salad.
Her arms were thin, composed of nothing but muscle and sinew, and her slender hands ended in digits thickened strong by years of manual labor in the desert soils of New Mexico. They were not the fingers of a bon-ton matron, although they once easily could have been. As time will do, especially under a desert sun, it had imprinted but had not stolen away her pretty face or taken her lively gait or made her uneasy in the night. Spiders, propane gas, and the tilt of the earth — those were something else.
The trailer — Ingold didn’t own it any more than a car or even a bicycle — was only a couple of years away from qualifying as vintage, yet the relic was tidy, at least the twenty feet of it on the west end where she lived; if 117-square-feet of living area can appear spacious, hers did through an absence of material goods (Jean: “Who started calling things ‘goods’?”). If significance in life lies in accumulation, Ingold was running on empty.
In her room was the chair, a table, cabinet, dresser, narrow metal-frame bed, a few hanging clothes, hot plate, toaster, and refrigerator (empty, it might hold a pair of gallon jugs of milk). There was also a propane furnace she refused to use, relying instead on an electric-coil heater to warm her fingers of a winter morning. I have not attached the adjective small in front of each of those objects because the repetition, while accurate, would be undeft, but small indeed everything was. The entir
ety of her belongings could fit into the back of a (small) pickup truck. When she changed location, her mover was the U.S. Postal Service, Parcel Post division. In a nation of bodily and materially increasing obesity, Ingold had mastered the challenge of living thin, or, in a self-effacing explanation, “I’m poor at owning.”
On that southern desert, she conditioned the trailer air with a six-inch electric fan and an automobile sun-shield (found in an alley) set across the west window; in the afternoon, during a short lie-down on the floor, she might add a basin of cool water and a washcloth to wipe over her bare body. It made for a fair nap. That water usually came from rain barrels under the downspouts on the landlord’s outbuildings or what could be collected off the trailer. When rain wasn’t there (annual precipitation was nine inches), she resorted to the cold-water tap in the bathtub, but that stuff was hard and unpleasant.
Ingold owned two lightbulbs: a hundred watt and a sixty. She ground by hand dried beans “to hasten the cooking time and save electricity.” The month before I visited, her electric bill, at three dollars and fifty cents, failed to meet the minimum payment (the cost of an ice-cream cone, which she declined the warm evening I offered to bring one). She had no phone, no television, no radio, no music player, no checkbook, no credit cards, no insurance, no debt. She did have a savings account. Her carbon footprint was that of a house cat. She quoted Thoreau: It is impossible for me to be interested in what interests men generally.
Paying no rent for her 117-square-feet, she instead mowed, trimmed, weeded, and watered the landlord’s scraggly trees and his perpetually stressed square of grass. Several times Ingold attempted to persuade the former West Virginian to try xeric landscaping, but for him natural beauty came only in water-sucking, broad leaves of green. He was her senior by a few years and would buy almost anything if he deemed the price cheap, and sometimes she was the beneficiary when he bought on sale more produce than he could eat. Except in his friendliness, the landlord was nearly the opposite of his tenant, a Manichaean arrangement that had worked for more than a decade, their association interrupted only a few times, most notably when, after studying the large United States wall map above her bed, Ingold decided to learn more about her country.
She laid out a plan to live for six months in two different towns each year. Carefully placing only necessities in two modest backpacks and six liftable cartons, she sent the boxes ahead — Parcel Post, general delivery — and boarded a bus, taking off first to the Salems, Oregon and Massachusetts; then to Lansing, Michigan; and later to Columbia, Missouri (our paths never crossed). What she carried along was only valued possessions: a portable typewriter, a few clothes, photo albums, and a ten-inch file of significant documents, including her poems (“It’s light enough I can carry it out in case of fire”). Additional clothes, utensils, and miscellanea, she readily replaced from thrift shops, donating things back when the time came to move on. It was a good plan, but housing proved considerably more expensive than her limited footage in the morning shadow of the Sacramentos and a panoramic view of the San Andres.
She hadn’t driven a car in a dozen years and had disliked driving when she did because “sudden decisions are always in the wings”; even though she was widely recognized — if misinterpreted — in Alamogordo, her operator’s license was simply for identification. I have read about people other than vagrants or the institutionalized who subsist on less than Ingold, but I’ve never spent time with one, excepting a couple of monks whose cells were larger than her room. This Age of American Nimiety had given me a long curiosity about any anti-mammonist who renders no respect to avarice and acquisition.
(Perhaps this is the place to mention my forty-eight-month deacquisition plan some years ago to get rid of at least one material possession, large and small, every day. It went along easily for a while, some days seeing a dozen things recycled or given to the Salvation Army; I concluded that the program was working when a guest looked around the house and said, “Does anyone live here?” But, once I reached my books, things turned difficult. After three additional months of donations to the public library, the project began to totter. One afternoon it came to me: why not, when my voice in the human chorus at last croaks into silence, consign books — now sifted into useful concentration — to my alma mater? And so I rewrote my will. Q has since argued that a good book is not a material possession but a spiritual one. Nevertheless, books aside, I believe every object I continue to dispossess myself of further unencumbers my mind and allows it to think more crisply. Whatever you find muddled in this book, clear-sighted reader, feel free to ascribe its imprecision to the walking stick my great-grandfather made from a limb of an orange tree, or my father’s pocket watch, or the medicine stone an Osage gave me, none of which I’ve yet seen my way clear to give away. And there could be one or two other things, like that 1850 ink bottle from Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain might have dipped a pen into. Still, I realize sentimentality does not assist perspicuity.)
Our talk that first evening, Jean and I — as initial conversations often do — hopscotched about, I (and perhaps she) avoiding a sharp focus so that a broader picture might emerge.
Topic: She was reading a library book, Physics for Dummies, although she was graduated magna cum laude from American University in Washington, DC (Ingold looked up the Latin before accepting the diploma), and she had also received from the Wall Street Journal an award for “excellence in finance courses.” (With it came a free subscription to the Journal, a gift as fitting as Mother Earth News to a Republican.) “In science, I’ve never been very capable, even though my former husband was a physicist at the Air Force base down the road. He helped develop the lunar excursion module, the LEM. I worked there too as a secretary in the Radar Measurement Division.”
Topic: Not long before my arrival, her typewriter abruptly malfunctioned and, beyond reasonable repair, joined the Land of Goners. Within a week, as if miraculous, she came upon another in a Dumpster, but it wasn’t just another — it was an old machine identical to her earlier one and in working order, down to its ribbon. In demonstration, she pulled it from beneath the bed, opened it, and clicked in a few words of greeting to me. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” she said, “unless you call being old wrong.”
Topic: Food-eating contests were worse than revolting self-humiliations — they were symptomatic of profligate consumption, an encouragement to overeat, to get so supersized one has to jumbo-size one’s clothes and car and furniture. The problem, really, was the obesity of all contemporary American life and its inflated desires.
Topic: The night before, there had been a ruckus at the pit-bull trailer; slammed doors, thrown beer cans, shouted profanity. “The woman’s voice was animalistic and violent,” Jean said. “If I owned a record player — and a record — I’d have put on Brahms’s ‘Lullaby’ to calm them” — pausing — “or maybe the ‘1812 Overture’ to accompany them.”
Topic: “Don’t you think if pulchritude, for example, or synthesis or hydraulic or some others meant what the f-word means, we’d hear it less often? Most swearwords are just too easy to say.” On the other hand, she saw no real use for unpronounced letters: the w in sword, the k and gh in knight, the p and maybe the e in pneumonia.
“Oh,” she said, “did I ever write you that it was pneumonia that brought me from McLean, Virginia, to the Southwest, to Tucson? When I was five or six, I came down with it five times, so my father left a good job as a statistician with the federal government and moved us to the desert air. He took the opportunity to try to become a writer, but it came to nothing, and we ran out of savings. Watching his efforts go nowhere, I have to say, taught me something about the greatest failure — not trying in the first place. The best angle to approach a problem is the try-angle.”
Topic: I said her wondrously compressed economy reminded me of a couple of lines from an Emily Dickinson poem:
It would have starved a Gnat —
To live so small as I —
“Her birthday
’s the same as mine, but I don’t think we’re very similar. She’s terribly cryptic. I’d rather be less enigmatic.” Pausing again. “Actually, I don’t know how to be enigmatic.” Nevertheless, I said, you both have worked intensely and independently but not in isolation. Nodding, she said, “There’s no recluse in me” — smiling — “I’m a woman of the streets.” Then another aphorism she liked: “At low tide, islands may touch.” Was America at low tide? “Maybe so. Maybe as long as we believe solutions lie in greater efficiency rather than in less consumption.”
Topic: A Newsweek magazine article saying “the ten pounds Americans gained on average during the 1990s required an additional 350 million gallons of fuel a year,” adding that a three-hundred-pound person carries the energy equivalent in fat of about fifteen gallons of gasoline. “How long,” mocked the reporter, “will we let this resource go unused?”
Most days Jean walked around in Alamogordo, often carrying a plastic trash bag for the litter she picked up along the route of her errands, each day a small exploration, sometimes crossing paths with someone in need. She said, “A few years ago in Tucson, I came upon a beggar woman, and I didn’t help her. Her expression intimidated me, so I kept my distance. That’s odd, because I know her side too. Then, not long after, when I was back in Alamogordo, I found a ten-dollar bill on the street, and I thought how that woman should have found it instead of me. So I tried to track her down, and eventually I did and sent her the ten and added another ten with a letter saying I hoped she’d spend it on clothes, and I told her where the Tucson thrift shop was. A month later, I got an envelope with hand-drawn flowers on it. It was a note of thanks. I wrote a little essay about our meeting. ‘Investing in a Beggar,’ I called it. To my surprise, the money I invested in her — and then some — came back to me from a magazine that published my article.”
Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Page 30