Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Yet, in a land of inversions, why not the flames of Hades reflecting the pure fires of the Empyrean? Why not in a place that looks like the end of all existence, a realm to unnerve anyone who falls into imagining his own bleached and disarticulated skeleton, only a jawbone holding a few teeth to tell who he was? You are alone. Go ahead, try it, call out for someone, shout until you have no more voice. There’ll be no answer: not now, not later, not until some other fool hiker, much too late to help, happens upon your molars.

  But more reciprocity: What if someone would step out of the darkness? A someone to disrupt the forsakenness you’re there to experience. Who, other than a shadow bent on evil? Who else would come into an overcooked land brought from the mind of an inexperienced godling in his first essay at creation, having a go at it and getting it all wrong, his unseen hand dividing the waters to let dry ground appear and pronouncing it good until it refused to bring forth a tree yielding fruit after its kind, an Eden gone awry, everything driven out except serpents, and the Inceptive Word saying on some third day, This is no damned good, and cursing deserts thereafter to be the dominion of demons and devils for the purging of souls.

  Walk here in sackcloth to repent a life lived too abundantly, frivolously, and blindly in a nation too easy and forgiving of excess, in an era so accommodating one can ignore the universe being mostly a lethally dry void where wetness and life and light are exceptions. Here, one finds connection: ground too hot or cold, wicked lakes turned to salt, dry alkali beds raising mirages to taunt thirst, columns of dust dancing in satanic spirals.

  But that’s the short view because from such a place the incipient waters once rose and from them the prima materia and from them stamen and pistil, ova and legs and mind, words, music, theorems, walks on a moon that is a nightly presentment of planetary origins in its rocky desolation of first matter, a world forever hopeless of seed. The sharp stones here inscribe themselves into a hiker’s soles, a reminder he didn’t just wander without purpose into this stunted severity; he came deliberately, driven by that thing that killed the cat.

  Beyond Poker Jim Ridge there were, of course, a few dwellers having dominion over wandering cattle, and farther yet a handful of other people offering gasoline, a meal, or a place to sleep. And schoolchildren too; some of whom will put in more than a hundred-thousand miles on a bus before they complete their final required year, and those others who get stashed up north in Crane at one of the last public boarding schools in the nation. Seldom are those young visible. It was difficult to think of any dwellers as residents because the territory did not really allow true human residence; instead it tolerated only passers-through, some merely moving along faster than others, and even natives born in the Malheur three generations ago have the look of itinerants, and so in reciprocity it was easy for them to tolerate my passage.

  But being only a passer-through can sharpen perceptions and make keen the awareness that the traveler will leave and never be a resident, the place being better for his departure. Those dwellers are some of the descendants who responded to a newspaper ad for the Catlow Valley, the one immediately east of Warner Valley:

  100,000 acres of choice sage-brush land in one of the greatest valleys in Eastern Oregon. We start excursions to settle this rich valley on April 1, 1910. We can settle 500 families on choice rich land. It will all be gone by Sept. 1, 1910. Will you join us?

  In the valley—today holding only a single ranch and the ghost town of Blitzen (“lightning”)—many dwellers stayed not even long enough for their newly born to learn to ride a horse.

  One morning, under haggard clouds, I walked to a basalt ridge of fragmented and fallen blocks heaped up and spent like a collapsed and exhausted city. In the rubble of the old magma, from clefts, cracks, crannies, crevices, the toughest of plants struggled out a pitiful, creeping, briefly promising existence, trying to go as far as they could, like the dwellers, before the next cataclysm inverted things again. In his The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles, Melville writes, “In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist.”

  People of the Malheur share, if not a yearning, at least a respect for spareness and natural parsimony, and they dread congestion, touched as they are by their intolerance of any encumbrance other than space and weather. Had the early Spanish explorers of North America made it this far, they might have left one of their Texas toponyms here: El Despoblado, the unpeopled, and the dwellers would find it accurate enough, although today some of them might prefer a name like El No Trespasso. One fellow, upon learning I was a writer, asked me not to give away any secrets of his hugely hidden-in-plain-sight purlieu. He found subsistence sufficient but time too scarce, often tapping a finger to measure the moments before I would move on. “If you write about these here parts, you remember this—you say it’s one hell of a place.”

  The southeast section of the great rectangle that Oregon is composes about one-quarter of the state but holds less than one-half percent of its population. Outsiders, to be sure, look for ways to fill the land, and some are succeeding with usurpation up at Bend near the northwest corner of the Malheur quadrangle. No one I met here spoke of Bend respectfully; after all, they are old residents who know the old place names: Poverty Flat, Mud Lake, Starvation Springs, Deadman’s Bedground, Skull Creek, Coffin Butte.

  On the Oregon-Nevada line not far southward, in Denio, I asked a café waitress how to pronounce the name. “Duh-nye-oh,” she enunciated, “but if you live here, it’s just Denial.” Indeed. The Malheur denies most of what Americans have come to believe they need, and in that denial, in that refusal, rejection, disavowal, and repudiation lies the essence of the dwellers, some whose ancestors by force took the place from the Paiute people. Of the dozens of names on my map of the territory, almost none is Indian and four of the half-dozen most important toponyms honor military men: Harney, Steens, Alvord, Abert. Westward fifty miles and just north of Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, a highway historical marker mentions the Bannock War of 1878 in saying the Paiutes “ravaged the country [before] finally being defeated and dispersed.” Across the last three words someone had sprayed in bloodred paint: SLAUTERED. The misspelled word unequivocally expressing the inverted views of dwellers red and white.

  So: People killed each other over a land which still today is ready to do it for you should you make even the simplest of miscalculations: too little water, gasoline, protective clothing; too much cockiness, inexperience, anxiety. In the tiny café at Fields Station a little north of Denio, the owner keeps count on the wall of the annual number of burgers and milk shakes sold. There’s no record of visitors who get lost or those who grow uneasy and certainly not those who find clarity of mind in a place capable of blowing away paltry sediments of a material culture cluttered with insignificances as if they were desert grit. Take that Missouri writer who went out after dark for a little ramble among the greasewood, and neglected to keep track of how far he’d gone until realizing he was probably lost, and feeling fear creep up his spine, and only then remembering to sit down to wait for the clouded sky to open and Polaris to shine through and set him straight.

  One morning, sixty miles east of Poker Jim Ridge, I followed a loop road up the easy slant of the broad back of Steens Mountain, a route so gently inclined that eight-year-olds compete in an annual ten-kilometer footrace over a portion of it. To arrive from the west and motor up Steens is soon to scoff at calling this uplifted mass of basalt a mountain. Ridge is the word, or should be, never mind that it’s almost ten-thousand feet high and that in June it’s often icebound and called Snow Mountain.

  Miles up the grade, sage changed to alpine flowers and mountain mahogany, and that to aspen copses, and then, abruptly, nothing at all grew, everything turned to weather-wrecked rock. Beyond, the ground fell away sharply as if the edge of a flat world where behind lay a horizon of snow and stone and ahead was only air, air one-mile deep. How could a land risen so high fall so far?

  A page from the Malheur notebook

  Steens
Mountain is another piece—a magnificent piece—of fiery under-earth thrust upward nearly two miles above sea level, only later to be eroded and excavated by its inverse elements, water and ice. Rock born of a burning River Phlegethon took its shape from glaciers crawling its spine, some of them reaching its shoulder to plunge off into a lake below; and when the ice was gone entirely, it left cirques twelve-hundred-feet deep and nearly three-thousand feet above the dried mud of another Pleistocene lake, now naught but a playa called the Alvord Desert that stretches twelve miles north and south and seven miles eastward from the foot of Steens Mountain.

  The desert below was a white expanse of alkali that makes the playa when wet look as if it’s burning, and when it’s dry the wind drives whirling carbonates washed down from the Steens to where there’s a lake bottom but no lake, only a Tophet dazzlingly level and lifeless except on days city dwellers gang in to ride wind-driven sailers. The cracks in the hardpan could swallow most of a yardstick, but two tons of a truck will sink in less than an inch. In season there can be a few inches of actual water looking more like a fata morgana than what it is, and that’s yet another inversion. The Spanish could have called the place a Jornada del Muerto, which today would mean little since we paved the roads to Gehenna with asphalt instead of good intentions, and you can take them at eighty miles an hour.

  I went back down the mountain and on around it to the playa and walked onto the desert bottom crazed with fissures and glazed with sun. Far out on the heated hardpan, I watched a spiraling column, as if on legs, arise from nothingness and begin moving toward me, and I took off for the ancient shoreline where once ice rivers came down from the mountain. No wish in me to be an Elijah and ascend heavenward in a whirlwind. But I couldn’t make it, and after several yards I stopped to let the brown eddy overrun me. The warm grit covered me head to toe like a shroud, and I got a mouthful of the dust devil, and spitting grit I said, This is one hell of a place.

  IN THE GUISE OF FICTION

  First published in a women’s magazine with a cautious if not downright socially conservative orientation, this story passed editorial muster perhaps because at the last moment and without my knowledge, it was labeled a “memoir.” Of all the pieces in this book, “The Last Thanksgiving of Whispers-to-Hawks” most nearly belongs to that category, although its fictive guise, no matter how thin, makes it by my definition a short story—never mind that family members once present at our holiday celebrations (those who have not yet joined the choir silent) can readily recognize nearly everything here; I hope they will see not an affront but a celebration of things too long left unhonored.

  The Last Thanksgiving of Whispers-to-Hawks

  To invite Uncle Billy to Thanksgiving dinner was to invite trouble, and not to invite him was to be accused of uncharitableness if not bigotry. So our parents extended invitations apprehensively but dutifully, their disquietude, for my elder brother and me, adding zest to what would otherwise be a meal of religious pontification and tired sermonage. While Uncle Billy was not a full-blood Osage, in our line he was the closest to it and, in my ten-year-old mind, a pretty good incarnation of Indianness. To him, Thanksgiving was a perturbation of that tribal blood—after all, the holiday celebrated the voracious beginning of one era and the long glide toward twilight of another. If for him Columbus Day was a time of sorrow, Thanksgiving was a day of lamentation. To ease his guilt in his participation, he liked to sow little upsets like dragon teeth that might grow into something larger in a boy’s mind. His last Thanksgiving at our home in Kansas City, Missouri, was the first one after the start of the Korean War.

  Uncle Billy—Christian name, Wilbert; Osage name, Whispers-to-Hawks—and Aunt Dorene arrived tardy in their bent-up Nash, the old fellow somehow managing to catch—or succeeding in hooking—his sleeve on the horn ring to set our sedate street blaring his arrival. Almost frail, but straight of spine, he escorted our aunt to the door of our house, loudly and unnecessarily hallooed their presence, and returned to the Nash. From the trunk he took a brightly beaded and fringed clean shirt, pulled off a white one equally fresh, and vigorously, elaborately, ceremonially, began wiping isopropyl alcohol across his thin chest and under his arms. He rarely used water to wash anything other than his hands and face and hair. From the kitchen window, I heard our grandmother calling as if choking, “Somebody! Somebody get him!” My father went to the door, in hand the lure of a highball held aloft.

  Nodding, Uncle Billy stepped toward the house, stopped abruptly, returned to the still-open trunk, and proceeded to change his trousers. The kitchen, the windows now full of faces, lay in a silence presumed only in a crypt. My brother whispered to me, “This could be the best Thanksgiving ever.”

  Midway in drawing up his trousers, Uncle Billy paused to open again the bottle of isopropyl. Yes, this was going to be a good Thanksgiving. In the kitchen, the silence changed to gasps, all of which could be translated into spoken English as “Oh my god, the neighbors!” and Aunt Dorene rapping against the window. My father went again to the door, highball still in hand, and calling no louder than necessary to avoid alerting any neighbors not yet at their windows, “Wilbert! Not in the street!” Uncle Billy waved an assent and finished his midtown ablutions, hoisted his trousers, and buckled his belt. Our neighbor Mrs. Canton, who believed there was a link between her husband’s balding and his cutting down a tree infected with Dutch elm disease, had come out onto her porch in order to miss nothing. Uncle Billy, stepping rather bowlegged to let the rubbing alcohol dry, waved to her and said warmly, “Fine day for the national gluttony,” and came smiling into our house, a halo of isopropyl giving notice of his entrance. From our bedroom window, my brother whispered, “Country-Boy Indians, one. City Slickers, zero.”

  Whenever Uncle Billy came for a visit, the children would blow in out of nowhere like dust balls from beneath a bed, and we’d pat the old tribesman’s pockets for small gifts: a carved peach pit, a willow-twig whistle, a walnut shell holding not a nut but a minuscule drawing of a horrifically toothed and drooling pigman. On that Thanksgiving his little gifts settled the house and restored a calm in everyone except Mary Margaret whom we called Aunt Tott.

  She was a good cook—her peach conserves were her annual birthday gift to me—but she had turned her life into a dried flower pressed in a hymnbook. Were such possible, she was a widowed maiden who had talked—or prayed—her husband into an early grave he must have found wonderfully peaceful. Soon after his funeral, she began holding forth about her own demise—only days away these past many years—usually in terms of claustrophobia: For her, there was to be no lid on the casket. Only a thin tea towel over her face. The real reason, I once overheard my father say, was so that she could talk right through it to any of those six feet down who, inescapably, could not but listen. Although without meanness, Aunt Tott was a twelve-gauge Christian and there was no bucking her authority.

  As if a cavalry lieutenant, she would pursue Uncle Billy up into spiritual coulees where she tried to force a surrender of any heathenism, pantheism, and idolatry she was certain he was inflicting on children. Of pure Anglo descent—her maiden name Tottenham—she was imposingly broad of shoulder, wide of beam, yet not truly corpulent, and she used her dominating size to oversee the spiritual condition of the household, particularly the young. No child escaped her inquisitions to ferret out false doctrines, or the pronouncements of heresies that leadeth only to damnation; to her, more than any other, did I owe the awareness that my ten-year-old soul hung in the balance at every moment. At each holiday dinner, to Aunt Tott fell the task of giving the blessing, which was always a sermonette to correct, if not an adult’s, then at least a child’s waywardness.

  When Uncle Billy was present she more than once mocked the old notion that Indians were a lost tribe of Israel while pointing out that, like the ancient Hebrews, Indians were possessed by a Dark Power whose name dare not be spoken. They had been placed in the New World wilderness to test white men and prove the rightness in taking the la
nd and making it fruitful. She made clear to my brother and me that, while Uncle Billy was not the D—l incarnate, he was surely a minion from down below.

  On a holiday meal, if the other women evinced little more than masked apprehension of Uncle Billy’s next piece of deviltry, Aunt Tott unfurled her guidon and—were it proper to say—girded her ample loins for righteous battle. On that Thanksgiving, she greeted him with a clear if unstated alarum to the household, an equivalent to “Circle the wagons, Christian soldiers! Here comes them pesky redskins!”

  Uncle Billy, his highball now in hand, returned her summons with a raised glass—“To the ripe fruits of the mother ship Mayflower!”—and Aunt Tott gave out her distinctive sigh of a woman long put-upon by the ungodly, pleased to get it in so early. (There would be time now for a couple more, each a demonstration to assist the shaping of a child’s soul.) My brother held up, for my eyes only, a sly two fingers on one hand, a fist of the other: Pesky Redskins, two; Fruit of the Pilgrim Fathers, zip.

  In Uncle Billy were the remnants of an old carny man claiming to have played the role of an attacking Injun in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Once, while the colonel slept, Uncle Billy claimed he snipped the famed goatee of the old Indian scout into a satanic forked beard. I believed the story until my father pointed out that Uncle Bill was all of six years old when Cody retired his show. Nevertheless, Uncle Billy’s yarns depicted him more as a wily counselor and strategist than a combatant, the tales often accounting for his glass eye: It had been scratched out by a bobcat, shot out by a senile Indian fighter, plucked out in his sleep by a crow trained by evil-hearted Pawnee. Those are ones I remember.

  On the Thanksgiving in question, he loped off into a Plains tale with a particularly dark cast before Aunt Tott, making it a point to listen from the redoubt of her adamantine belief, demanded a cessation of heathenism in front of children. Uncle Billy paused, reconnoitered her position, considered her firepower, and surrendered, we thought, to tell about the Reverend Obadiah Wilson’s most powerful sermon, a piece of brimstone that got the people in the revival tent so aroused they rose and thundered responses; they rolled and stomped and made such disturbance that the very ground beneath the pulpit collapsed and dropped the good reverend three feet down into an old Indian grave, and his hellfired soul had to climb out covered with the dust of an ancient Choctaw.