As often happens on 287, I see no one: no cars, no semis, no bicycles. The landscape of the road is stripped down, bare-boned. Few people make this drive; 287 is remote. It’s two-lane and it’s cut into the land in a series of narrow canyons and sharp mountain passes. In the hour-and-a-half drive, there’s one sometimes-open flea market/post office, two closed cafés, three churches, and thousands of acres of dry ranchland.
I roll down my driver-side window. For the short space of the drive, everything is immediate: the empty road, the air that smells of brush and pine, the long spaces of quiet that it’s easy to mistake for calm in a cold, windswept spring in the Wyoming West.
On April 29, 2009, the news began to break and then swell, first by email then phone then radio, then online literary journals, local television stations, and national newspapers, that forty-two-year-old American poet Craig Arnold—author of Shells, author of Made Flesh, winner of the Rome Prize, the Yale Series of Younger Poets—had disappeared two days before while on a hike on a volcano in Japan.
Craig was on a research trip in Asia. He’d taken a ferry from a nearby Japanese island, those two days before, checked in at a local inn, drunk a cup of tea, dropped off some bags, and gotten a ride to the sandy base of an ancient strato-volcano, Mount Shintake, from a village resident. He was wearing dark pants and a nylon jacket, carrying a phone and walking sticks but no food or water. The volcano hike was supposed to be a quick hike, an easy hike, rated for difficulty two out of ten. He planned to be back to the inn for dinner, the innkeeper and local resident said.
He wasn’t back for dinner. By nightfall Craig hadn’t called his family; he hadn’t returned to the inn. He hadn’t been seen by the guests he’d befriended on the ferry to the island, the resident who gave him the ride up the mountain, or any of the people who lived in the neighborhood houses near the mountain road down. Instead, it seemed that he had disappeared, vanished, maybe got lost—no one knew—on a four-by-twelve-kilometer island of 160 residents and three volcanoes, in a country the size of Montana but containing 124 volcanoes, in the Ring of Fire, a region less than .01 percent of the world’s landmass but with 452 volcanoes, three-quarters of the world’s active volcanoes.
While the rest of us were sitting around long seminar tables discussing poetry or fiction or pedagogy, writing in chalk on the blackboards in our classrooms, walking, running, driving around town, out of town, through town, Craig was hiking volcanoes, smoking mountains imbued with the sublime, with the perpetual presence of the sublime, making space for the sublime if the sublime is not an emotion but a meeting, a seeking. “He was going,” his sister-in-law would later say, “where ordinary people can’t or won’t go, to tell what that experience is like.”
I slow down, turn off my headlights, and let the dark settle through my car until I can make out the lines of the road by the way the blackness changes—an eighth of an inch in gradient at most—the difference between an unyielding dark and a dark someone might find their way in.
I first met Craig in spring 2007. He was teaching poetry at the University of Wyoming. I was visiting Laramie from Chicago, thinking about leaving my temporary job to go back to school but unsure whether I wanted to move to a city that was so small, had so much open air. It was a chance meeting; I got the times wrong and showed up early for a different class; Craig walked into the otherwise-empty room. I don’t remember what Craig told me about the university or the landscape or if he said anything about these at all, only that he was wearing a buttoned-up, blue-striped shirt and black leather jacket when I met him, that we were in a small library, that his forehead gleamed in the light like an orange or a glass ball or something rough that had been polished smooth.
As it turns out, I didn’t move to Wyoming; I moved to Colorado and began commuting between the two states. While most of my friends were giving up their cars for city jobs, closet-sized apartments, and grocery stores that stocked no fresh fruit or vegetables but were in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights—anywhere there was the thrill of buildings, bodies, the subway of another city to conquer—I went back to school, began running in the foothills in the early mornings, and spending three hours a day on the highway.
I told people as an explanation, “My cousins live in Colorado,” which they did, but this wasn’t why I moved to Fort Collins instead of Laramie or why, twice daily, I chose to drive 287 instead of some other route. At the time, I couldn’t lay my finger on exactly why I did this beyond that I felt unable to settle into the life of any particular city and strangely compelled by the driving: the never remaining in one place, the constant motion along the edges of somewhere so vast as to be almost imperceptible.
In his travel writing class, six months later, Craig asked everyone to come to the semester with a writing project in mind, something we’d start a short collection around. Though I considered writing about Chicago or the glacial landscape I had returned from that fall, in the end I chose 287. Nothing I handed in that semester ended up concerning the highway. As many times as I tried to write about the road, I never quite could.
In ancient myth, Japan’s great throng of volcanoes was birthed when the god Izanagi, the father of the Japanese islands, beheaded his son Kagu-tsuchi, the deity of fire, and chopped his body into eight pieces. The act was a retribution for Kagu-tsuchi’s prenatal crime of burning his mother, Izanami, to death during his childbirth. The eight pieces of Kagu-tsuchi’s body became eight volcanoes. Although Izanagi’s tears and Izanami’s belly continued to birth gods and goddesses as Izanami lay dying, with Kagu-tsuchi’s birth their co-creation was over. The rise of the volcano—in Japanese, kazan or “fire mountain”—signaled, in effect, the beginning of an end.
The geographical impetus for this mythology is clear: Japan, itself, sits on the intersection of four tectonic plates—the Pacific, Philippine, Eurasian, and North American—and as a result, the country contains 10 percent of the world’s volcanoes. The Global Volcanism Program, a project of the Smithsonian that “seeks better understanding of all volcanoes through documenting their eruptions, small as well as large, during the past 10,000 years,” has mapped all the known volcanoes in the world as red triangles on a world relief map. In Japan, the triangles fork, heading northeast, northwest, and southeast in almost continuous lines, each triangle pressing up against another.
This was part of the reason Craig went to Japan: this, to climb Mount Fuji and to follow in his poet-mentor Bashō’s literal steps. Craig was writing a collection of prose poetry on volcanoes, a project he planned to call An Exchange for Fire. He’d already summited volcanoes in Peru, Nicaragua, Greece, Colombia, and Guatemala, all before Japan. Japan was Craig’s final trip before completing the book.
That midafternoon in late April, Craig did what he’d been doing for months and years; he set out on his own for an easy hike, probably taking mental notes and maybe photographs as he went, anything that could help him make poetry. This was simply one more in a long string of volcanoes for Craig, a hike that should have taken three, maybe four, hours.
Cold and windy or dark and pathless, writes Craig, in an online travelogue of his journeys through Japan, what is this forest in which we find ourselves? Or rather where we lose ourselves to find our way out? A destination needs desire. To reach it requires will. The wanderer has will without desire, to move without getting anywhere, but to keep moving … it is like the shark who must keep moving, moving to breathe, moving to stay afloat, or else sink, into the dark blue depths, under the weight of endless tons of water, where even the light of the sun, if it could reach that far down, would be pale and cold.
One need not shrink from the sublime, Craig writes in another entry on the same site, in response to Wallace Stevens’s poem “Esthétique du Mal.” Nay, one may rather seek it out, with a pack on your back and a stick in your hand, liberal applications of sunblock and when necessary a gas mask over your face.
Twenty miles outside Laramie, I drive past the backside of the brown “Welcome to Wyoming” si
gn. On 287 you feel a difference between one place and another. Unlike so many geographies, here the lines are mapped right. The Wyoming stretch is open, crossing a high plain and an even higher ridge with miles of mountains on either side. As you reach the Colorado border, suddenly there are trees, evergreens: lodgepoles, ponderosas, and Scotch pines with clusters of green-blue needles pressed up against and falling over the road. There are rocks too—red granite boulders—bigger than my car, rising out of the hillside, balanced between trees or under them, or perched, on their own, off to the side.
A few minutes after the Wyoming sign, through the line of evergreens, I descend one long hill and up another into Virginia Dale, Colorado. The hills are it for the geography of Virginia Dale—then one dirt road, a couple of houses, and a church. At the bottom of the hill, there’s a bronze plaque reading, THIS MEMORIAL IS PROPERTY OF THE STATE OF COLORADO and Famous Stage Station on the Overland Route to California, 1862–1867 … Vice President Colfax and party were detained here by Indian Raids.
At the crest of the hill is the boarded-up post office, peeling peach-colored paint and a half-green, half-tin roof; there’s a white mobile home just behind it—also empty—and a large gravel parking lot in front of it where truckers sometimes park for the night in snow or rain or ice.
“He’s lost and he needs my help.” This is what Craig’s brother, Chris, said. “My brother doesn’t have a great sense of direction and uses a GPS to find my house in Brooklyn, but he’s not a person who takes stupid chances. He’s lost and he needs my help.”
Everyone, it seemed, believed Craig needed their help. When Craig didn’t return to the Watanabe—the inn where he was staying—by eight then nine p.m., the innkeeper began to worry and contacted the island’s fire brigade to warn them a foreign hiker might be missing on the island. Within a few hours, volunteers had driven the roads along the bottom of the volcano and climbed all four of Mount Shintake’s well-marked paths looking for Craig and calling his name.
By the following morning forty people were searching the area; a team of policemen came over from a larger island to coordinate the investigation and contact American authorities and Craig’s partner and son. Rescuers and locals went into the densely wooded forest on foot with search dogs looking for alternative routes or shallow recessions where Craig might have slipped and been injured. Telephone and satellite companies tried to make contact with the GPS on Craig’s phone; a military helicopter was employed to circle the volcano and the island’s coastline.
Back in Wyoming, our department chairs, Beth and Peter, and professors, Brad, Alyson, Harvey, and Kate, fielded calls from the media, talked to Craig’s family and friends, and sent emails to the graduate students and English department, trying to piece together as many details of the situation as possible. My office mates, Dixie and Tyler, and I gave each other updates when we drifted in and out of our conference-room-turned-office between teaching and our own literature or writing classes: footsteps discovered that might have been his, updated times and sightings of Craig by travelers and locals earlier in that trip and even that day. Mostly we talked about how it didn’t seem real, that surely, in a few weeks’ or months’ time, Craig would be back in his office, just upstairs.
We were nearing the end of the term when Craig went missing; the late-spring high-altitude sun was already streaming through the windows onto the oriental rug, the long wooden table in the corner, and the paintings on the wall.
When I was a child, I had a book called Pompeii … Buried Alive! It was the story of the sudden volcanic eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius and the later archaeological find of the city of Pompeii. Once there was a town named Pompeii. Near the town there was a mountain named Vesuvius. The people in Pompeii liked living by the mountain. It was a good place to grow grapes. It was a good place to raise sheep. And—it looked so peaceful!
In the book, there was a red tree of fire under the grassy mountain, wide at the base, like a ball, then shooting straight up through stacked layers of purple and gray rock until the top layer of rock, when the rock became smooth and the red shoot became branches, all curving upward to the open air like a maple tree, or an oak, in spring.
The day started out the way it always did, the book continued after that picture of the fiery tree. The sun rose. People began coming to Pompeii with things to sell. Fishermen were bringing fish. Peddlers were bringing melons and straw hats. Farmers were bringing vegetables. Shepherds were bringing sheep. Carts rumbled through the narrow gates and into town.
I didn’t remember that book until the week Craig disappeared, but suddenly I began to think of it often. I asked my dad if he knew where it was in our house. After he looked through old boxes of books in the basement and couldn’t find it, I tracked down a copy online from a local library. It seemed strangely important, somehow, to return to where I first learned about volcanoes, to see again that image of the tree under the mountain.
Road conditions on 287 are sometimes bad and, more often, unpredictable. Whiteout, blowing and drifting snow, rain, fog, strong winds, ice; these are the road condition categories on the Wyoming Department of Transportation website. Each of them is cycled through regularly, sometimes in just a few days. When things get particularly dire—drifted and blowing snow, visibility less than a quarter mile—the road closes altogether, stranding travelers in Fort Collins, Laramie, or sometimes—like those trucks on Virginia Dale hill—between the two.
Even when the road’s at its best, it’s still dangerous: at least forty people have died on the thirty-five-mile Colorado stretch of 287 in just the past ten years. I once saw a map of these deaths in the newspaper. In that newspaper article, a red dot was placed over each mile marker where a fatality had occurred. At mile 386—Ted’s place, named after 1920s Colorado senator Edward “Ted” Herring, and the spot where 287 merges with Colorado 14, an east–west highway along the continental divide—there were eleven red dots. At mile 380, five miles short of the Wyoming border, five more. At marker 360, Owl Canyon—one of the few places in Colorado where alabaster is found—there were eight dots, at mile 353—just after 287 leaves Laporte—there were six.
In 2001, on the Wyoming side of 287, a crash killed eight University of Wyoming student athletes, all cross-country and track runners. Seventeen miles north of Laramie, their SUV was hit by the pickup of another student athlete from the rodeo team at 1:30 in the morning on a Sunday in September. After the crash the Wyoming Department of Transportation performed a statistical analysis of 287. The study found the probability of crashing on 287 to be similar to other Wyoming roads, but crashes on 287 were twice as likely to be fatal.
Six months into my own driving of 287, a man on a cell phone several cars in front of me misses a turn and steers his car over a steep bank. Six months after that, the truck of two university nursing professors spins out, sending another car over the edge, killing both the professors, injuring four others. And six months after that, my friends Matt and Adam flip their truck leaving 287 for a dirt road. Matt is fine; Adam—a builder—breaks his arm. Twice, my own car dies on 287; once I blow out a tire on the inside of a blind curve, but I don’t realize it until I hear my metal tire rim scraping along the asphalt.
Still, some nights when the weather is clear, I drive while watching the sun fall over the mountains and the wood-post wire fences by Cherokee Park Road or the dry streambed just below it. Occasionally trucks fly by, but more often than not, except for the steady hum of my moving car, everything is quiet. The long grasses, the red dirt, the farm fields: in the early evening haze, even the dusty highway is streaked with a kind of light.
Craig’s classes met often at bars or restaurants or his apartment instead of a classroom: anywhere there was alcohol and baba ghanoush. Craig was all energy, frantic in his teaching and in his critiques of the poetry that we wrote. More pressing, he scrawled sideways, across one of my pages, right over the text, this is it! finally on another.
We were reading Bashō in Craig’s travel wr
iting course before he left. The moon is brighter since the barn burned. The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
should I take it in my hand
it would melt these hot tears:
autumn frost
dew trickles down
in it I would try to wash away
the dust of the floating world
how easily it rose
and now it hesitates
the moon in the clouds
We talked about many things: Wyoming, world literature, food, our travels and attempts at travel writing. One student was following pronghorn through Yellowstone that spring, tracking their numbers and mapping their shrinking migration corridors; another had come back from Guatemala after two years in the Peace Corps working as a cowboy during Jueves Negro; someone else had biked across Greece, visiting ruins and sleeping in temples; Craig was hiking volcanoes; I was driving.
Still, though the class was full of talented poets and writers, I remember clearly only a single line from any of the other students’ work. There was silence, the woman wrote about a phone conversation with her ex-boyfriend, and the sound of something breaking. We were sitting at a long wooden table when she read this, right next door to the library where I’d first met Craig. The lights were a blunted yellow and it was snowing outside, hard—this I remember—so hard that when the highway opened two days later the endless drifts had washed clean the plains.
Halfway through my drive along 287 I see the Virginia Dale Church, a white clapboard chapel that seats thirty with a cemetery and two outhouses and only meets on the second Sunday of each month. There are two churches along 287 and an abbey, though I don’t discover the second church—the Livermore Community Church, a broad tan and brown-trimmed building that backs to 287, a ways off the road, so you can only see the steeple from the highway—until a few weeks before I leave for good.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 6