Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  A letter arrived from E. V. Griffith, editor of Hearse. He apologized for his long delay in responding to the poetry Brautigan submitted. Out of the batch, Griffith was keeping only “The Rain” for the next issue. Under separate cover, he sent a copy of Promotion, his new publication, which contained a review of Lay the Marble Tea and reprinted two of the editor’s “favorites” as a Brautigan sampler. “Hope there is no objection on your part,” Griffith concluded.

  Richard did object. He learned that E. V. Griffith had already reprinted his poetry in earlier issues without prior permission. “The Rain” was Brautigan’s final appearance in Hearse (no. 9, 1961). It was also the last time he published his work in “little” magazines for several years. Small presses paid nothing, aside from an implied hipness-by-inclusion. After his success with Carp Press, Brautigan knew he was much better off self-publishing his poetry. Also, he had other things on his mind. He was going fishing.

  During the winter and spring of 1961, the Brautigans focused their thoughts on the adventure planned for the coming summer. They “discovered Schedule C,” the self-employment form of the federal income tax, and received a $350 refund. With this windfall they bought a rattletrap ten-year-old Plymouth station wagon that embodied the notion of a moving violation. Stan Fullerton came to the rescue. A can-do sort of guy, practical in the many mechanical ways where Richard was all thumbs, Stan took the jalopy over to an automobile graveyard and bought replacement parts from the best of the rusting junkers abandoned there. These included “a new tailgate and lights all around.” Fullerton installed the parts “on the spot,” trading in what he removed as partial payment on the “new” junk.

  Richard required minimal fishing equipment. Preferring to wade wet, he owned neither hip boots nor chest waders. He had no use for a fancy vest to store his flies, leaders, and other tackle. His fly rod was an RA Special #240. Priced at $14.99, the two-piece seven-foot fiberglass rod was a purely utilitarian “smoke pole.” With a Japanese Olympus reel and a spool of cheap floating fly line, it was all the gear Brautigan needed for catching trout.

  Secondhand camping gear scrounged from friends and scored for discount prices in Army surplus stores transformed the Brautigans’ apartment into a makeshift bivouac area. They acquired a tent and sleeping bags, pots, pans, skillets, and a two-burner Coleman white gas camp stove, all previously trail-broke. A Coleman lantern (a necessity for a couple who liked to read late into the night) was the only brand-new piece of equipment that Richard and Ginny purchased, a shopping experience Brautigan transformed into a chapter (“A Note on the Camping Craze That Is Currently Sweeping America”) in Trout Fishing in America.

  The Brautigans gave Jake, their surviving black cat, to their former roommate, Kenn Davis. Boaz met an unfortunate end months earlier. She crawled through an opening in the wooden cover of an unused backyard laundry sink and was unable to climb back out again. No one heard her desperate crying, and she died, like a creature from a Poe story, entombed in the tub.

  By June, Richard, Ginny, and Ianthe were ready to hit the road. After storing their few possessions with friends, they vacated the Greenwich Street apartment and loaded the station wagon with all the camping stuff and baby things, along with two orange crates stuffed with books (“Rimbaud, Thoreau, Whitman”) and a Royal portable typewriter (the Smith-Corona Price Dunn gave Richard had succumbed to mechanical problems) loaned by Ray Lopez, a barber with a shop in the green-copper-clad Columbus Tower building at Kearny and Columbus where Brautigan got his hair cut. He no longer wore bangs, parting his pale blond hair on the right. Richard also shaved off his beard, but kept the drooping mustache. With high hopes, they headed east across the Bay Bridge in the Plymouth, destined for new possibilities.

  Richard and Ginny drove over the Sierras on U.S. 40, passing through Reno, where they tied the knot four years earlier. Somewhere in the Nevada desert, they pulled off the highway and wound down a narrow dirt road into a broad basin fronted by an earthen dam. They made camp on the level surface of a dry lake bed and feasted that night after dinner on a large watermelon bought from a roadside grocery. The watermelon may have provided their salvation. Richard got up to relieve himself in the middle of the night and noticed huge thunderclouds roiling in the dark sky overhead. It was about to rain. A flash flood would inundate their campsite.

  Richard woke Ginny, and they set to work striking camp on the double. “We almost killed ourselves,” Ginny recalled. “We had all this stuff. We had to cram it in, really fast.” If there was no danger of drowning, the possibility of having water up over their hubcaps and getting stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere seemed very real as the skies opened up above them. The raindrops came down the size of silver dollars. By the time the tent was folded and packed into the Plymouth, along with their books and all the other gear, it was a deluge.

  Ginny was terrified. It rained so hard she couldn’t see to drive even with the lights on. Richard ran backwards up the road, waving his arms to show her where to turn as the station wagon slid around the slippery curves. Once they gained the paved highway and knew everything would be okay, the whole nasty experience became something they could laugh about, their big trip almost over before it had barely begun.

  The Brautigans turned north for Idaho on U.S. 93 at Wells, a tiny truck stop fifty miles east of Elko. Ginny did all the driving. Richard sat, sometimes holding the baby on his lap, staring out at the vast open country. All along the way, he sang a tuneless song of his own invention. “Oh, my Orofino Rose,” he crooned, repeating the single line of his simple ditty over and over. (Their trip never took them as far as Orofino.) Pushing on past Twin Falls, they set up camp on Silver Creek, near the tiny town of Picabo, Idaho. Brautigan rigged his rod and set out after trout.

  Richard sloshed into the chill mountain water in his blue jeans. During his first week in Idaho, Brautigan fished in Silver and Copper creeks, and on the Little Wood River. He bought a new twenty-five-cent Key brand spiral-bound notebook and began a list that he headed “Names of places where I caught trout, in order of appearance, 1961—Idaho, a travel song, a ghost song.” Silver Creek topped the list, followed in short order by the Little Wood River and Copper Creek. Compiling such catalogs became one of Richard’s lifelong preoccupations.

  The list grew as the summer unfolded. The Brautigans headed next for the Sawtooth National Forest, to a network of narrow valleys between the Smoky Mountains and the Soldier Mountains. They settled in at a campground on Big Smoky Creek, stream number 4 in the notebook. Several other prime fishing sites in the surrounding area were added in quick succession: Paradise, Salt, Little Smoky, and Carrie creeks.

  The weather stayed hot and humid, and it frequently rained. During the midday hours when fishing proved unproductive, Richard set up the portable Royal and worked on his novel. The high mountain meadows provided excellent grazing, and many bands of sheep had been herded up to summer pasturage. Brautigan wrote of several woolly ungulate encounters (“Everything smelled of sheep on Paradise Creek [. . .]”) and of giving a bottle of beer to a shepherd “who looked like Adolf Hitler.”

  Large concentrations of lamb on the hoof invariably attracted predators, and Richard listened to the mournful calling of coyotes in the rain. He captured their howls in his singular prose. (“Their voices are a creek, running down the mountain, over the bones of sheep, living and dead.”) Salt Creek had been kind to Brautigan. He once caught “seven trout in fifteen minutes,” and later eased a beautiful bejeweled Dolly Varden from its swift-moving water.

  Richard disliked the printed signs he saw warning of explosive cyanide capsules set out to kill coyotes. He wrote down a mock version of the government warning and had Ginny translate it into Spanish. Both appear in the chapter “The Salt Creek Coyotes,” where Brautigan, troubled by what an old-timer in a local bar had told him of the lethal lures, compared the cyanide capsules to the gas chamber at San Quentin.

  Richard and Ginny headed west, winding along narrow Big Smoky Roa
d and Shake Creek Road to Featherville, where they turned north through Rocky Bar on James Creek Road to an isolated campground at the edge of the wilderness area beneath East Warrior Peak. Here, Richard fished the Middle Fork of the Boise River and the Queens River, catching trout in both places. Taking a break from camping in the rain, the Brautigans followed the Middle Fork down past Twin Springs and cut through Boise and its expensive motels on their way to McCall, where Ginny had relatives.

  The road north through Horseshoe Bend, Banks, and Smiths Ferry followed the North Fork of the Payette River, still muddy from the spring runoff. Route 55 paralleled the west bank of Cascade Reservoir for its entire scenic sixteen-mile length. “The mountains were so beautiful,” Ginny remembered. “It was just an untouched place at that time.”

  The little 1880s town of McCall nestled under the spruce on the southern shore of snow-fed Payette Lake. The area’s alpine beauty provided the location for the 1940 Spencer Tracy film Northwest Passage. Ginny’s cousin and childhood Reseda playmate, Donna, lived in McCall with her husband. She wasn’t from Idaho or raised as a Mormon, growing up pagan in Southern California. “She became a Mormon when she was eleven or twelve,” Ginny remembered, “but I guess all along her mother and her mother’s family were Mormons.”

  Richard and Ginny drank Mormon-brew decaffeinated coffee and discussed the threat of Communism with Donna and her husband. (“The smell of coffee had been like a spider web in the house.”) Brautigan described the visit in a chapter he called “The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader’.” He also mentioned buying “tennis shoes and three pair of socks at a store in McCall” and fretted about the lost guarantee. Insignificant banal moments became part of Richard’s work from the very start.

  Idle conversations with strangers in McCall (store clerks, waitresses, and a ten-year-old girl sweeping a restaurant porch) became another continuing concern in his fiction. The chapter followed the Brautigans back across the high country, where patches of snow still resisted summer. They drove along the South Fork of the Payette River, stopping in Lowman for a strawberry milkshake, and caught their first glimpse of the magnificent Sawtooth Mountains when they looped into Stanley Basin from the north on Highway 21.

  The town of Stanley, a random collection of log cabins and double-wides scattered beneath the crenellated cathedral upthrust of the Sawtooth Range boasted “four or five bars.” The Ace of Diamonds Club sat derelict with its windows broken out. Richard thought Stanley “a fine town.” On Saturday nights, one of the bars hosted a dance called the “Stanley Stomp.” Once, hitchhiking through town after fishing, Richard stopped in at a tavern and asked if they had any port wine. The bartender said he didn’t think so but took a look anyway and, from behind a bunch of dusty bottles below the bar, pulled out the lone jug of port. He blew the dust off the top and uncorked it. Brautigan “drank the first and last bottle of port wine in Stanley, Idaho.”

  The Brautigans set up their tent at Unit 4 of the Little Redfish Lake campground, three miles south of Stanley. Right on the lake, the place had a fantastic view of mountains Richard erroneously believed to be in Montana. Best of all, it was free, unlike the Big Redfish Lake campground, charging $3 a week “like a skid row hotel,” and crowded with trailers and Winnebagos. Richard and Ginny decided to spend the rest of the summer in Stanley Basin. Their campsite boasted a fine table for eating and work, in addition to a sheet-metal cookstove with “no bullet holes in the pipe.”

  The Salmon River (the River of No Return) flowed on the other side of the highway. In a letter to a friend, Richard described the fishing as “the best I’ve ever seen.” Ginny had a camera and took pictures of her husband angling, along with potential dust jacket shots of him posed against the gutted hulk of a thirty-year-old derelict automobile. For good times, they gravitated to the Rocky Bar in Stanley and shook their booties at the “Stomp.” Because of the baby, Richard and Ginny crawled into the sack early most nights, too tired to read from their carton-box library.

  At first light on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, forty miles across the mountains as the crow flies, Ernest Hemingway pressed his forehead against the twin upturned barrels of a favorite Boss shotgun, holding the walnut stock firmly against the floor, and tripped both triggers. It was a cloudy day. Richard Brautigan went fishing on Yellow Belly Lake with a forty-year-old Arkansas businessman he met in the campground. All the fellow could talk about was how afraid he was of losing his job. Neither of them heard any news of Hemingway’s death that day. Richard didn’t learn of his hero’s suicide until after returning to San Francisco in the fall, when he happened across the July 14 edition of Life with the Yousuf Karsh color portrait of Hemingway on the cover.

  Richard didn’t include his conversation with the nervous executive in the book. Instead, he recorded a ranting diatribe on the evils of socialized medicine in a chapter called “The Surgeon.” The surgeon was a neighbor in the Little Redfish Lake campground. He’d arrived a couple days before in his Rambler, pulling a trailer with his wife and two infant kids aboard. The Brautigans were leaving that afternoon, north to Lake Josephus. All morning, Richard fished alongside the surgeon, listening to him bitch and ramble, holding his own feelings in reserve. Later, camped on the edge of the Idaho wilderness, he shaped his keen observation of the angry doctor into a deft new chapter.

  During a near-monthlong stay in Stanley Basin, Richard Brautigan fished the Salmon River, Yellow Belly Lake, Valley Creek, Stanley Lake, Stanley Lake Creek, and Big and Little Redfish Lakes. Even with all the time spent wading streams and lakes, there were many long summer hours for writing. When not working on the novel, Richard maintained a lively correspondence. He wrote letters to Ron Loewinsohn and to Lou Embree, who was forwarding mail from San Francisco.

  In a note to Lester Rosenthal in New York City, Brautigan invented a macabre story about Kenn Davis starving Jake to death because he knew Les had never cared for his cat. One afternoon, Richard drew a number of childlike cartoons in a small notebook to amuse Ianthe, adding nonsense captions under the primitive drawings (“Fruit sign after breakfast,” “Fish without any bus fare, but he don’t care,” “Boat that just got over a bad cold,” “Watermelon with a sail on its back”). Richard never offered his daughter anything less than the full megawattage of his unique intelligence.

  The passages Richard Brautigan wrote looking out across Little Redfish Lake reflected the peaceful happy time he spent in Stanley Basin. Chapters describing sex in a hot spring surrounded by green slime and dead fish and Ianthe playing happily with a pan full of vanilla-pudding-flavored minnows conveyed the primal pleasures of living outdoors and fishing every day. Brautigan was not a purist. He used a fly rod and wrote of fly tying, dry flies drifting like ephemeral angels through his novel, but also mentioned fishing with salmon eggs and something called a “Super-Duper.” He used bait and lures without shame. The whole point was catching trout destined for the frying pan. In his notebook, Brautigan jotted down, “Number of times that we ate trout / 9 so far / 6 more.” Richard found a writer’s paradise in Stanley Basin. “I could not have come to a better place,” he wrote to Les Rosenthal.

  The Brautigans pulled up stakes toward the end of July, heading north into the mountains to Lake Josephus, situated between the Seafoam Mine (gold) and the Greyhound Mine (lead and silver). The River of No Return Wilderness stretched impenetrably ahead of them. Scattered all along the surrounding plateau, dozens of small isolated lakes beckoned the adventurous hiker. Richard fished Float Creek, Helldiver Lake, and Lake Josephus. Camping in such a remote spot provided ample amounts of solitude. Brautigan crafted two new chapters for his novel: “Lake Josephus Days” and “The Towel,” melancholy glimpses into the past and the everyday problems of dealing with a sick baby.

  Frost glistened on the morning grass. Chilly nights made campfires a necessity. Their blue smoke drifted down the valley toward the distant clanging of a sheepherder’s bell mare. After leaving Lake Josephus, the Brautigans crossed over from Wells Summit and linge
red into autumn along Carrie Creek, a spot they’d liked a lot when they fished there earlier. Richard started filling the back of the station wagon with firewood. Although fishing remained excellent, snow might fall any day now. It had been a wonderful trip, but with summer over and cash running low, it was time to head for home.

  Back in Frisco, Richard and Ginny found a top-floor North Beach apartment almost right away. Located at 488 Union Street between Montgomery and Kearny (“one unbroken flight of stairs for three stories”), above Yone’s Bead Shop, and next door to a Laundromat, the place was a convenient two-block walk from Washington Square. “I can look out the window and see nob hill [sic],” Richard wrote in a November letter to Sam Broder. “The lights go on there at night.” Brautigan told his friend about the book he’d been working on for over a year and hoped to have finished by spring. “It is called Trout Fishing in America. I don’t know whether anyone will want it or not, but it will give me a perfect excuse to get drunk and rant and rave about my poor little lost american novel.”

  Price Dunn showed up to help paint the apartment. The agreement was that he could stay for however long it took to get the job done, one week, two tops, and then he’d be on his way. As Ron Loewinsohn recalled, “The apartment got painted. Price didn’t want to move. Richard had to put his foot down. Price moved.” In Loewinsohn’s opinion their relationship boiled down to: “Price was always wanting a place to crash, and Richard was always putting up with him, putting up with him, and then finding this person in his house that he couldn’t deal with.”

  The Brautigans threw a big housewarming party. Price Dunn got “uproariously drunk.” He ended up with some girl he didn’t know and couldn’t remember the morning after.