Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  He must have been right because I was driving when it went completely out of whack, just limp. It wouldn’t shift into anything. We stopped and investigated. There were four empty bolt holes on the shift column. We walked back down the road almost a mile looking for we didn’t know what, found nothing and came back.

  The silence there—after the hot engine had stopped contracting and popping—was total. No birds, no insect noises, no wind, nothing. All you could hear was the blood humming in your ears. Andy checked the column closer and decided there was no piece missing, only the bolts. He ran wire through the four holes joining whatever parts they were together, then crawled underneath with a 10-inch Crescent wrench and tightened up some boss nut that held the entire truck together. He knew his stuff; we had gears again.

  Not far from there in a dry wash we came upon the carcass of a pony, dried, perfectly preserved, as in a museum. It was standing upright, or rather hanging. Someone had taken thick strands of hair from his mane and tail and tied them to the branches of a mesquite tree. Whether before or after death we could not tell.

  * * *

  Soon we were climbing a range called Sierra de la Giganta. The road goes right over the top and on the steep switchbacks the engine started missing again. At each new level we stopped to regroup and plan the running start for the next stretch. Sometimes there was a choice of roads, a short steep one or a long, not-so-steep one. The way we were gunning the truck in low it’s a wonder we didn’t throw a rod. On one long grade near the very top going about 3 m.p.h. in low, engine shrieking, the Rattler coughed and misfired completely and we were almost in a dead stall when Andy bailed out and began to push. If he hadn’t I believe the truck would still be there. The reduced load and added thrust of one manpower just got us over.

  That afternoon we descended into a deep canyon and entered Comondu, a strange place indeed. It is an oasis of springs and date palms on a narrow canyon floor, bounded by towering cliffs. Hidden, isolated, it is the Shangrai-La of Baja. About 700 people live there and they have the power to cloud men’s minds. At least I find no entry for the place in our notebook, except for arrival and departure times. Of course we were already loopy from the heat.

  Just before sundown we hit gravel. It was a head-rattling washboard road but nonetheless gravel, two lanes wide, the work of some official road gang up from La Paz. Andy scented victory. He took the wheel and drove like a madman, jaw set, eyes hooded. We bounced and skittered all over the road at speeds approaching 35 m.p.h. and such was the racket that we didn’t talk again—we couldn’t—until 11 p.m. when we reached the pavement and I finally got him to stop. I was glad I didn’t have to use the pistol. We flaked out in the ditch, spent.

  * * *

  July 23. Mile 1,170. A long pull at the water bag, no hash, and off at 7 a.m. The pavement was good and a little after 9:00, at mile 1,268, we rolled into La Paz. We were very proud of the Rattler.

  La Paz (Pop. 34,000) is situated on a pale green bay, and oddly, for a Gulf-side town, faces west. For 400 years it was one of the world’s great pearl fisheries but there has not been much pearling in recent years. The locals say their Japanese competitors put “something” in their water before World War II and ruined the oyster beds. The town now caters largely to Americans who fly down to catch marlin and sailfish and such. (The richer anglers go to Punta Palmilla, down on the Cape, where there is an exclusive luxury hotel suitable for high-level, right-wing plotting.) In La Paz there is a pretty drive along the bay called El Malecon. The bay is shallow but there is a channel that permits sizeable ships to come in and tie up at a T-head pier. A big new ferry shuttles back and forth to Mazatlan on the mainland.

  We checked in at the Perla Hotel and had breakfast in the outdoor café. Our hands were swollen from gripping the wheel. Fat fingers. Nobody from the local paper came around to interview us, but we were joined for coffee by a thin American lad from San Francisco named Gregory. He wore a Bob Dylan cap and sported a ban-the-bomb button and one with Huelga! (Strike!) on it.

  He said he had been there two months working at the John F. Kennedy Bi-lingual Library. But the library business was a drag and the fish cannery workers were afraid to organize and he was anxious to go home and get back in the vineyards with the National Farm Workers’ Association. He said he didn’t know Jim Smith.

  “The thing is, nobody reads books here,” he said. “You just sit there all day. All they read is schlock stuff like the Police Gazette and Bugs Bunny and those photo-novels.”

  Andy and I discussed going fishing. Or skin-diving. Or maybe driving down to the Cape, to the very tip of Baja. We still had half a roll of wire left. But a tropical lassitude had set in and we didn’t want to do anything.

  That night we ate at one of the fancier hotels, Los Cocos, in a grove of coconut palms on the bay. The dining area was outdoors, paper lanterns and all. Aeronaves pilots frolicked in the pool with stewardesses. A good many Americans were there, all of whom seemed to be talking fishing except us and two men in the bar who were still mad about Truman firing MacArthur. One said, “You can have Nimitz. MacArthur won that war. He was the finest soldier that ever put a foot in a boot.”

  Later we went to a nitery outside town called Ranchita, sharing a cab with a talkative sport from Las Vegas and his silent, unhappy girl-friend. They had flown down that afternoon. “I didn’t realize it was so far,” he said. “I thought we’d never get here.” We let that one slide, with difficulty.

  * * *

  The Ranchita had colored lights and a cornet player with a sharp Latin attack but everybody seemed to be down in the dumps. Surely they weren’t all worrying about Mac. Then a tall drunk fell on the dance floor, right on his chin, and this brought what Franklin W. Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys books, would have called whoops of laughter. Jim Smith had told us he once had a difference of opinion in the Ranchita with “Duke Morrison.” Who? “Duke Morrison. You know him as John Wayne.” He said he didn’t come off badly either.

  July 24. Andy had to get back to Los Angeles and he caught the morning plane. I stuck around to see about the Rattler. A customs agent said yes, he understood I wasn’t trying to profiteer, and yes, vehicles were needed there, but the law was the law. It would not be possible to sell the truck. Then I would give it away, perhaps to an orphanage. Was there one in town? Yes, but that too was prohibited, unless the arrangement was handled through customs.

  Word got around that the truck was for sale. For the next two days prospective buyers came to my table at the Perla where I sat drinking coffee and reading the Warren Report amidst a swarm of small, barefooted Chiclets salesmen. But I couldn’t close a deal the way I had worked it out. On the third day a cab driver came over. His card identified him as Abrahan Wong V., Taxi No. 17 (English Spoken). I couldn’t figure out the name; was there a country club anywhere in the world that would accept this man? I told him the truck had overdrive and 40 pounds of oil pressure. Both spotlights worked. It had used only one quart of oil on the drive from L.A., which was true.

  Yes, yes, he could see, the truck was bonita. He had once owned a Studebaker Commander himself. Very good car. He had broken his arm and nose in it. He showed me the place on his nose. How much was I asking?

  How much would he give? He thought for a minute and said $300. I said okay. Like a fool, too fast. He smelled a rat and started backing off.

  “Have you got tlikslik?”

  “What?”

  “Tlikslik. Tlikslik.” He mimed a piece of paper.

  The pink slip, the title. I said “no” because I had only recently bought the truck myself but I had the temporary thing and the bill of sale. It was clear.

  “Must have tlikslik,” said Abrahan Wong V.

  That afternoon I made a deal with the owner of a sport fishing boat. I would sell him everything on the truck—gas cans, water cans, a 3-ton jack, crowder peas, Mazola, two spare tires—the lot—for $200, and give him the truck free, if he could get an okay from customs. Done, he said. Except.
Wait a minute. He was a little strapped right now. He would give me $100 now and mail the other $100 later. Oh, but he would send it very soon. All but weeping, I let the Rattler go for five $20 bills.

  On the $51.25 flight back to Los Angeles they served a good baked chicken lunch. A man across the aisle asked if I had been down on the Cape and I said no. “You missed the best part,” he said. The peninsula looked more barren and forbidding from the air than at truck level, and if I had flown it first I’m not sure I would have gone overland. Jim Smith said a woman in San Francisco once told him she was planning to make the Baja run, and what should she do for preparation? He told her to pack a lunch.

  The Forgotten River

  This story appeared in the September 1991 issue of the Arkansas Times, which was then a monthly magazine and is now a weekly newspaper, based in Little Rock. Dee Brown, the historian and writer (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) from south Arkansas who inspired this trip, died in 2002 at age 94.

  The forest rangers at Mena were all very nice but they could tell me only approximately where the Ouachita River began. It rose somewhere out there in the woods, they said, above the little bridge at Eagleton, where I would find the first Ouachita River road sign. I wanted to see the very origin and so I floundered about between Rich Mountain and Black Fork Mountain with further inquiries.

  Through that forested valley runs Highway 270, as well as the Kansas City Southern Railway, and the headwaters of the Ouachita, at an elevation of 1,600 feet above sea level. The two mountains rise another thousand feet or so from the valley floor. A sign warns hikers about the presence of black bears.

  Nearby, right on the Oklahoma line, there is a log cabin beer joint, which might have once served the Dalton Brothers; Bill, Grat, Emmett, and Bob. It was dark inside, like a cave, with a very low ceiling. The girl behind the bar knew nothing, which was all right. You don’t expect young people to know river lore.

  Then a young man sitting far back in the gloom—the only customer—told me just how I should go. I was to enter the woods at the start of the Black Fork Mountain hiking trail. When I reached the river, here a small watercourse—“so narrow you can straddle it”—I was to walk upstream for about a mile, and there I would find three or four trickling threads of water coming together to form the Ouachita River.

  This would have to do, though I had hoped for a spring, a well-defined source. Probably I didn’t walk the full mile. I followed the diminishing rivulet up to the point where it was no wider than my three fingers, and declared victory. After all, it was much the same as spring water, cold and clear. I drank some of it. From here it flows 610 miles, generally southeast, to Jonesville, La., where it joins other streams to form the Black River.

  I grew up in south Arkansas and thought of the Ouachita only in local terms, certainly not as an outlet to the sea. It was a place to swim and fish. I knew you could take a boat down it from the Highway 82 bridge near Crossett to Monroe, La., because I had done it once with a friend, Johnny Titus. It was shady a good bit of the way and we had the river pretty much to ourselves. The keeper at the old Felsenthal lock was annoyed at having to get up from his dinner table to lock through two boys in a small out board rig.

  But I knew no river lore, less than the Oklahoma barmaid, and it came as a great surprise to me lately when I learned that there was regular steamboat service on this modest green river, as late as the 1930s, and as far up as Camden. I am not speaking of modern replicas or party barges, rented out for brief excursions, but of genuine working steamboats, with big paddle wheels at the rear, carrying bales of cotton down to New Orleans and bringing bananas and sacks of sugar back upstream, along with paying passengers.

  There were two vessels, the Ouachita and the City of Camden, and they ran on about a two-week cycle—New Orleans-Camden-New Orleans, with stops along the way. The round-trip fare, including a bed and all meals, was $50. Traditional steamboat decorum was imposed, with the men required to wear coats in the dining room. At night, after supper was cleared, the waiters doubled as musicians for a dance.

  It was Dee Brown of Little Rock, the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, who told me about this, and how as a teen-aged boy in the late 1920s he took the Ouachita from New Orleans to Camden. He had a summer job at a filling station between Stephens and Camden, and had often watched the steamer tie up and unload. “‘I’ve got to ride that boat,’ I kept telling myself.” He saved up a bit more than $50 for the adventure—“an enormous sum in those days”—but then thought better of this extravagance. He would keep half of it back. “So I made a reservation for the other end and hitch-hiked down to New Orleans. Hitch-hiking was easy and safe then, and faster than the boat.”

  His timing was good, which kept expenses down. He paid a dollar for a night’s lodging at a boarding house near the French Quarter. The trip back was a delight, as Mr. Brown remembers, a leisurely voyage of five or six days. He got full value for his $25. The big splashing wheel pushed the steamer up the Mississippi, the Red, the Black, and at last into the Ouachita at Jonesville, with the two walls of the forest closing in a bit more day by day.

  There were fine breakfasts of ham and eggs, when ham was real ham, with grits and hot biscuits. At lunch one day he found a split avocado on his plate, or “alligator pear,” as it was called on the menu. “I had never seen one before. I wouldn’t eat it.” Young Mr. Brown was traveling light and so had to borrow a coat from a waiter at each meal before he could be seated. He had a tiny sleeping cabin to himself with a bunk bed and a single hook on the wall for his wardrobe.

  He enjoyed the nightly dances, though he had to sit them out as a wallflower because he didn’t know how to dance. Townsfolk along the way came on board just for the dance, and among them were young Delta sports sneaking drinks of corn whiskey and ginger jake. These were Prohibition days. A young girl from New Orleans, traveling with her family, offered to teach Dee Brown how to dance. “I wanted to dance with her, too, sure, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.” This family, he recalls, who had never seen any high ground, marveled over the puny hillocks of the upper river. He remembers an Arkansas woman vowing never again to eat sugar, after seeing the deckhands, dripping with sweat, taking naps on the deck-loaded sacks of sugar.

  * * *

  Dee Brown, then, got me interested, and so in late May and early June [of 1991—Ed.] I drove down the Ouachita valley to take a look at things.

  The Ouachita National Forest, where the river rises, is still a dark green wilderness, if not quite the forest primeval that DeSoto saw when he came crashing through these woods 450 years ago, with some 600 soldiers, 223 horses, a herd of hogs, and a pack of blood hounds. He was looking for an other Peru, out of which he had taken a fortune in gold, more than enough to pay, from his own pocket, for this very costly expedition. As it turned out, there was no gold or silver here in “Florida.” What he found was catfish.

  “There was a fish which they [the Indians] called Bagres: the third part of it was head, and it had on both sides the gilles, and along the sides great pricks like very sharp aules [awls]; those of this kind that were in lakes were as big as pikes: and in the River, there were some of an hundred, and of an hundred and fiftie pounds weight, and many of them were taken with the hooke…”

  This comes from a report written by one of DeSoto’s Portuguese officers, who identifies himself only as “A Gentleman of Elvas” (the town of Elvas, in Portugal). The Portuguese version was published in 1557, and was rendered into this King James English by Richard Hakluyt, and published in London in 1609, under the misleading title of “Virginia Richly Valued.” Hakluyt was promoting English exploration and settlement in the New World, and any news at all from that quarter was grist for his mill. There is not one word about Virginia in the text, and a more accurate title would be “Florida Poorly Valued.” By Spanish reckoning, the continent belonged to Spain, being a gift from Pope Alexander VI, himself a Spaniard, and all that country lying east and north of New Spain (Mexico) was re
garded more or less as Florida.

  Elvas tells of seeing “…many Beares, and Lyons, Wolves, Deere, Dogges, Cattes, Martens [minks] and Conies [rabbits]. There be many wild Hennes as big as Turkies, Partridges small like those of Africa, Cranee, Duckes, Pigeons, Thrushes and Sparrows…There are Gosse Hawks, Falcons…and all Fowles of prey that are in Spaine…”

  He spoke too of “small chestnuts” [chin quapins] and of “many Walnut trees bearing soft shelled Walnuts in fashion like bullets,” which could only have been pecans. Some of his “Plummes and Prunes” were very likely muscadines and persimmons. There is no mention in his bestiary of buffalo, or bison, then roaming the country from coast to coast. DeSoto’s men knew about these “hunch-backed cattle,” as they had traded with the Indians for their hides, which made good bedding, but they had no luck in hunting them and there is some question whether they ever saw one on the hoof. There is only one passing, inconclusive mention of a hunt. It is a wonder, perhaps, that they saw any wild creatures, who must have heard this band approaching from some distance away, clanking, snorting, grunting, barking.

  The forest has changed; it is no longer a virgin stand of timber with a high canopy and an uncluttered, parklike floor, on which horses could move about. The Beares and Deere still thrive, but the Lyons are gone, or so believes Larry Hedrick, of the National Forest’s Game and Wildlife Division. “We do get occasional ‘sightings,’ but there is just no good evidence of free-living, free-ranging cougars out there. Of course, they are reclusive, like bobcats. We’re overrun with bobcats, but you don’t see them.” As for the native red wolves, they have mated with intruding, wily, trickster coyotes to form a curious hybrid pack. The chinqua pin, sweetest of nuts, has disappeared too, in my lifetime, or it is almost gone, a victim of the chestnut blight.