She would get into the backseat of the car in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, go to sleep and emerge six or seven hours later in Hopewell, Virginia, a different version of herself. Maybe that’s what going back to the place of your birth always does to someone, but I used to think that sleeping all the way through Maryland must have exacted an effect on her—she must have traded Marys there, one Mary for another, in that land of all those Marys.
The journey her parents made in their migratory flight from Greece seemed to have depleted their travel genes because they neither one went back to Greece, nor did Mary, nor did she tolerate any kind of journey well. The road put her right out. Ten minutes into a road trip, Mary was snoring—loud and full of drama, even in her sleep. If we stopped at a traffic light or a stop sign, the halt would never interrupt her rhythm, but every time we made a left-hand turn, her snoring stopped abruptly, then picked up again after a minute. Through a city, through Baltimore or Washington, for example, John could keep her quiet for a full ten or fifteen minutes by executing a series of sinistrally directed detours, but eventually we’d hit a stretch of open road and the snoring would start up again. If it got too loud, John would hum or start to whistle, sometimes sing, and the breathing from the backseat, though still heavy and deep, would be peaceful.
The drive had all these syncopations, then—the percussion of the asphalt road, the alternating rhythms of the landscape braiding, like convergent channels of a river, through divergent threads of time, history into the present moment; and the sounds of Mary snoring. Repetition was a rhythm, too: the more we traveled this same road, the more memories we had of ourselves in this landscape. We were doubling, multiplying as we went—especially John and Mary, going back and forth along a road they’d traveled for years, ever since they were married. Maybe that’s why Mary slept—so her past would stay, as new. So she wouldn’t have to see it all, again; watch it change, before her eyes—see the changes in the landscape. But John searched as he drove—I learned that from him, a kind of leaning forward at the wheel, trying to imagine whatever was out there, trying to inhabit what he could or could not see out in the distance. It was the future he was searching—that’s the mechanics of the road: the horizon line awaits, a destination, where you’re going. It’s the line of possibility. For John, driving south from Pennsylvania meant driving toward his own remembered past and the pasts of others in his family; transacting with his ghosts. It was a journey through both now, and then. The North, the South. All the Johns, and all the Marys (in and out of Maryland). Only Mary and Joseph surpass the coupled names of John and Mary as clichés in American Christendom. They’re the Dick and Jane of married couples. John and Mary. See Spot run. Run, John. And marry Mary.
My father first went south because he had to—drafted at the start of World War II, he was posted to Ft. Lee, Virginia, where he met my mother, who was working at the commissary. I don’t know how he made that initial trip—by bus, or train—but he must have grasped the coincidence that his paternal grandfather, John Wiggins, the man in whose memory he had been named, had been conscripted into serving his own nation, The Union, and had donned its dark blue uniform and marched south into Maryland, into Virginia, where in 1865 a piece of Confederate lead lodged in his head and he bled out, perhaps in the very woods we passed. Two John Wigginses—two wars—two conscripted journeys from Pennsylvania to Virginia. That original John Wiggins’s Certificate of Discharge from Company E of the 179th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the War Between the States hangs in a place of pride in my California home, and it’s as much a work of art as any of my daughter’s fine art photographs. The penmanship alone is thrilling—to say nothing of the latent narrative the facts suggest. There he was—the first John Wiggins—in the final year of a brutal war, wounded within months of its termination, discharged because of injury, turfed out at Alexandria, Virginia, and paid in full on August 5, 1865. How I came to be in possession of this document—how my father came to be, before me—seems to me a kind of blessed wonder, a small miracle. It might have passed, unnoticed, into history’s dustbin, but it didn’t. Its survival, intact, its materiality, is a result of fragile circumstance, the fact that it exists is a surprise. When I moved to California from London, my possessions followed me by ship, through the Panama Canal—eighty-six cartons of books, their pages looking sadly foxed and faded in their new surroundings under southern California light. It was only in unpacking that I noticed spots of mildew inside the glass of the framed Certificate of Discharge. Recently I finally got around to cleaning it. I hadn’t held the document, itself, since I found it among my father’s things, several days after we buried him. I had forgotten what that feels like, the touch of century-old paper, like a weathered buckskin to the hand. The paper—its crispness reduced by age to velvet—has life. Even if nothing were written on it, it would breathe of something, have spirit—the way a fossil does. The size and color of my great-grandfather’s Certificate of Discharge from the Civil War reminds me of that sketch by Leonardo in the Queen’s Gallery in London—same size, same sandstone color, same sketching-in depiction of a larger landscape, same miniaturization of an overview of life. When I stare at it I have the sense of looking at a kind of panorama of his life, as if this were a map of him. A map of part of him. On the back of the document on its shadow side, the side I hadn’t seen for all the years that it was framed, is another map, of sorts, a printed form entitled OATH OF IDENTITY, left blank. Its print runs perpendicular to the print on the other side, and it takes up only one third of the page, the suggestion being that it will form a kind of title page when the document is folded into thirds, the way certain legal summonses today fold up into themselves inside a single slim blue outer page. I believe the reason the OATH OF IDENTITY is blank is because my great grandfather must already have been known to the discharging officer or supplied that officer with some sort of irrefutable proof—possibly a photograph—that he was, in fact, the selfsame John Wiggins that he claimed to be. The only other piece of my great-grandfather’s map I own is, in fact, a photograph that’s come down to me on trust. By which I mean—I have no proof it’s him, only a verbal family legend that the people in this photograph are, indeed, the people I’ve been told they are—John Wiggins and his scrappy little soulmate Mary. Another John & Mary. And although this earlier John Wiggins bears no ancestral resemblance to the later John, my father—(except for those very deep-set eyes)—and although he assembles himself like a Puritanical pill, she looks like a whole buckboard o’ fun. Mary Book was her name—(and how nice for a writer to claim a Book on one limb of the family tree). He’s got his heels locked, hands locked in readiness for prayer. She’s got that one foot inchin’ forward, that one hand on her hip, that jutting elbow and those tinted glasses. Mammy Yokum, yes! indeedy; thin piss yoked to vinegar. This is the sum of what I know of her, this picture. And that she birthed at least four children. Details of women’s lives are usually only tangential in historical records, reflecting attachments to men and the labors of maternity. When I was teaching myself to use internet genealogy sites to write the Edward Curtis novel, I used my own family as the prototype and tried to find all I could about this John and this Mary because Curtis’s own father was my great-grandfather’s contemporary and had fought beside him in the Civil War. After trial and error I stumbled on this John and this Mary in the 1900 U.S. census, where there was nothing much to learn about my great-grandmother, not even her maiden name, and where John’s occupation is listed as FARMER, which is only a mere part of how he occupied himself, if family legend is to be believed. Family legend, as it came to me, is that John took a rebel bullet to the head after which he saw God, returned to Pennsylvania and started preaching his own fellowship, founding his own church. This may or may not be true but for the purpose of the Curtis novel it proved providentially insightful because by the time Edward was born in February 1868, his own father, Johnson Asahel Curtis, also had returned home from the Civil War, on a veteran’s disability, to b
ecome a minister. I had to wonder—how many of them were there, these ministering farm boys who joined up, went off, saw the South, saw death and then subsequently thereafter saw God? There’s something of the WAKAN TANKA, The Great Mystery, in war’s power to make braves of boys and wise men of certain braves. But if war makes the argument for peace for some, it makes the argument for sanctioned killing for far more and for every two men like John and Johnson Curtis who left the battlefield as proselytes promoting the word of God according to the Bible, there were hundreds more who left the battlefield better trained for the burgeoning killing fields out West. Whereas my great-grandfather had a reputed genius for threatening to invoke a wrathful God against transgressions that included imbibing fermented beverages, desiring universal suffrage and utilizing the lascivious comforts of indoor plumbing, Johnson Curtis appears to have been a sort of semi-pious parish journeyman, not particularly inspired by good works and The Good Book, but on the side of angels, on the whole, for want of someone of a finer cloth way the hell out there where the Curtises resided in Whitewater, Wisconsin. In 1874 he landed the job of circuit preacher for a region in the upper Minnesota lake country and took young Edward, then age six, with him on his rounds performing marriages and baptisms and, of course, last rites and funerals. Johnson’s health was never good after the war and he depended on his young son to manage the more arduous labors of their travels—harnessing the horses, rowing the canoe, foraging for food and wood and making camp. I’ve thought a lot about that young boy Edward—how the physically adept boy foreshadowed the physically courageous man. He was an engine of activity, as a man, running up Mt. Rainier, kayaking the Inuit coast, dogging Lewis and Clark’s trail down the Columbia. He was Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer rolled into one and what he lacked in formal schooling he made up for in raw strength and adaptive cunning. Legend has it that he built his first camera when he was twelve years old from a partial lens his father brought home from the Civil War—but how a complex and sophisticated piece of glass landed in Johnson Curtis’s forlorn Union Army bindle begs anybody’s guess. The story sounds like vintage Curtis, the kind of tale he loved to tell about himself when he was hustling his prospective buyers back East on the lecture circuit. He may always have had that mid-westerner’s braggadocio when he was in the company of Roosevelt and Harriman and Morgan, but on his own on horseback, scouting a location, he was in his element, physically at ease and physically commanding.
Physically beautiful.
As much as my father yearned toward landscape, looked at it with yearning in his eyes, he never put himself into it, engaged with it physically, until the very end—which made the circumstances of his death all that more shocking. You wouldn’t have thought he had the strength, the sheer ability to do what he finally did. But when I think of Curtis on the land, Curtis in the landscape, I can believe that he could tackle anything, that he had, from the very early years, a natural physical agility, a natural balance in the world.
Like the stereotypical male Indian.
Like Huck Finn.
I can imagine him saying to himself, as Huck does, “Well I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and civilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
Curtis lit out in a big way—so did my father—though it’s impossible to know for sure if they were running from or running to.
That’s the potency of lighting out, of journeying: the from and to are both in play.
Until you stop. Until you stop, the journey is the only rationale.
Huck never says where or what he’s bound for, he just needs to go. Make tracks. Get outta Dodge. Hit the highway. Avoid, elude, escape Aunt Sally. We all have our own Aunt Sally—call her loveless marriage. Call her thankless job. Call her parenthood. Domestic mess. Daily reminder of debt and obligation.
Tedium.
Routine.
The great promise here is that if we load the TV in the truck and move just three states over we can start anew.
Tie the cash cow to the Conestoga and set out across the Plains and Rockies.
Sell mama’s stuff and drive all night to Vegas.
Try to count the miles some Americans rack up on a single family tree, I dare you. Not every family lights out as spectacularly as Curtis’s—or my own Greek grandparents all the way from the Aegean to Virginia—but most families have at least one member who takes off. Throws in the towel and swears take that, Aunt Sal. Laissez-faire and laissez-passer constitute the air we breathe. It’s in the Constitution, the pursuit of. Hell, it’s written. It’s our right. Hell yes, drive all night to Vegas. Hell yes, join the circus. And in the nineteenth century they were giving land away, out here. The railroads were. Homesteading Acts arose in every western state connected by a railroad to the East, so in 1887 Johnson Curtis bit the apple, got the travel bug again and convinced himself that all he needed to restore his health was the purer climate of a Pacific kind. He boarded a Northern Pacific train in Minneapolis with Edward and headed out for Portland, Oregon, then north to Puget Sound, where he purchased land for $3.00 an acre on which he had been told palm trees swayed all the way from Mt. Rainier to the Pacific Ocean. Edward was then nineteen years old and had been serving as his father’s shadow body, his ailing father’s body double, since he was old enough to wield an axe, chop wood, say grace and talk to people. He had never had a childhood in the modern sense—rural children in the nineteenth century worked as soon as they could walk—so by the time he came west by train in the summer of that year, Edward had his own array of resident Aunt Sallys. Filial obligation. Family duty. His own self-imposed yardstick measure of his manhood. He was a man, already, at nineteen; but if any place can redefine a person’s sense of self it’s our American West. If Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had had our land equivalent, she would have put far fewer boys to sea.
Not that a frontier mentality makes a better corps of citizens—even today there are places out here that don’t have to fake, as Vegas does, that they’ve never seen the likes of Aunt Sally. There are places so removed from any civilizing germ that when you enter them for the first time you lose your own perspective, drop, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a history so much deeper than your own that your existence is too meager to make any mark in the historical record. The first time I drove out here on my own the land began to suck me under as if it were quicksand and the sky came down and whomped me. I’d come over to Canada from London on a job and I got the bright idea to drive south from Regina, Saskatchewan, to the Oglala Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge in South Dakota, because Curtis had been there and because I needed to see an American Indian reservation for myself if I was going to write about him and the people that he photographed. On a map the drive looks like a simple thing to do because you can run your finger down the page from Regina in Saskatchewan, through Montana, straight through North and most of South Dakota to Pine Ridge on a perfect north/south plumb line. But on any given map of land the one thing you don’t see is sky. I started out from Regina as the sky was lightening in pre-dawn and in about a half an hour I had left the civilizing confines of that western Canadian railroad town and was out on open land, looking south at a flat unbroken foreground toward unseen Montana just beyond the straight line of the horizon. The sky was crystal, clean, a deceptive non-menacing blue but it was crowding in, encroaching everywhere, flooding on the land and toward my throat, level to my neck, and if I couldn’t keep my head beneath it I would cut loose from the steering wheel and spin untethered into obliterating space. All around me there was nothing but uninterrupted space for as far as I could see, this single thread of road tethering me to what I knew, to where I’d been, where I was going. I pulled off the road to catch my breath and calm my heart from racing. I was the only human being on the scene. The only being, period. Except for a sky so vigilant and present it assumed all Being all itself, capital be. I got out and walked around the car and opened the passeng
er-side door and sat down in the door well and put my head between my knees. I am fairly robust, pride myself in my adaptability to foreign places, but for the first time in my life place was threatening to make me sick. Wind was an element of sky as it tore over the earth, no impediment to slow it down, to stand against its shapelessness and say THIS IS YOUR LIMIT. This is where you stop; and start. This is what you are. Be it for good or evil we are referential creatures, we need defining points, civilizing points of reference, and existence without antecedents panics us. Panicked me, at least. I realized I was having an unprecedented attack—a kind of agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces. I stood up and kicked around the grass beside the road, tried to find an insect or any living critter, any living thing, but there was nothing out there. Nothing. Not even birdsong. Not even a single bird to follow in the sky. I tried taking full deep breaths, then clambered up the trunk and stood on the roof of the car. What was it Archimedes boasted—? Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth. If I was higher, I could see a longer distance, I figured. See a human, maybe. See a barn. See something. Something to enforce the myth of I, the myth of who I thought I was that day, the myth of day, itself; the recurring human myth of time. If you’re going to light out, there has to be a something you are lighting from. From’s a given; from’s a certain. To is out there, in our minds, uncertain. No one can promise us a to. No one ever gives a certain future to us in our hands, that we can hold. If they allege that they can guarantee the future—if we believe they can—they are charlatans and we are party to their lies. And when you stand there in a place as immense as our own continental west with not another creature in your sight for miles and miles and miles around, you realize you are standing in the jaws of your existence. That the journey that you make through time—where you light out to—is the only meaning you can claim. Our lives are our individual claims on the combined experience—our lives are not our names or our professions—and somewhere there’s a big rig driver who may or may not have ever told the story of how he was hauling ass one morning years ago south out of Canada toward Montana when out in the middle of nowhere there was this woman standing on the rooftop of her car waving a giant crazy Hello!! at him as he barreled by, so he opened up the air horn and boomed her one, and how she hung back but kept behind him for at least an hour, ’til he turned off on Route 2 toward the West. By then, the geology had changed, Montana’s seismology had kicked in, there were other intermittent passing vehicles and train tracks beside the road to ease my panic, but what I remember most about that big rig coming up behind me is that I hadn’t heard it coming, what with all the wind, until it was on top of me and how I turned around and gave the driver a thumbs-up to let him know I didn’t need assistance and how he set that air horn off out there in the middle of the continent.
The Shadow Catcher Page 14