On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

  I mentioned in the same letter that I had a strange experience when I went down to a Beat festival in Monterey:

  My introduction to my host was strange: they said, “he’s here,” and led me into the bathroom. There I saw a sort of Christlike figure with his beard upraised in agony, clasping his arse under the hot shower. No doubt, the apparition of myself, black and gleaming, fresh from my bike, was equally novel and alarming to him. He had a painful perianal abscess, which I lanced for him with a brutish sailcloth needle sterilized by a match. There was a great gush of pus, and a loud bellow, followed by silence: he had fainted. When he came round he was much better, and I tasted the novel joy of being the practical man, the skillful physician-surgeon, who had helped the suffering artist. Later that day there was a crazy beatnik type party, at which young bespectacled women got up and recited poems about their bodies.

  —

  In England, one was classified (working class, middle class, upper class, whatever) as soon as one opened one’s mouth; one did not mix, one was not at ease, with people of a different class—a system which, if implicit, was nonetheless as rigid, as uncrossable, as the caste system in India. America, I imagined, was a classless society, a place where everyone, irrespective of birth, color, religion, education, or profession, could meet each other as fellow humans, brother animals, a place where a professor could talk to a truck driver, without the categories coming between them.

  I had had a taste, a glimpse, of such a democracy, an equality, when I roved about England on my motorcycle in the 1950s. Motorcycles seemed, even in stiff England, to bypass the barriers, to open a sort of social ease and good nature in everyone. “That’s a nice bike,” someone would say, and the conversation would go from there. Motorcyclists were a friendly lot; we waved to one another when we passed on the road, made conversation easily if we met at a café. We formed a sort of romantic classless society within society at large.

  Finding that it made no sense to ship my motorbike from England, I decided to get a new one—a Norton Atlas, a scrambler which I could take off the road, onto desert tracks or mountain trails. I could keep it in the hospital courtyard.

  I fell in with a group of fellow motorcyclists, and every Sunday morning we would meet in the city, go over the Golden Gate Bridge onto the narrow, eucalyptus-smelling road which wound up Mount Tamalpais, then along the high mountain ridge with the Pacific to our left, descending in wide swoops to have brunch together on Stinson Beach (or occasionally Bodega Bay, soon to be made famous by Hitchcock’s film The Birds). Those early morning rides were about feeling intensely alive, feeling the air on one’s face, the wind on one’s body, in a way only given to motorcycle riders. Those mornings have an almost intolerable sweetness in memory, and nostalgic images of them are instantly provoked by the smell of eucalyptus.

  On weekdays, I usually biked alone around San Francisco. But on one occasion, I approached a group—very different from our sedate and respectable Stinson Beach group—a noisy, uninhibited group, sitting on their bikes drinking cans of beer and smoking. When I got closer, I saw the Hells Angels logos on their jackets, but it was too late to turn around, so I drew up next to them and said, “Hello.” My audacity and English accent intrigued them, as did, when they learned of it, my being a doctor. I was approved on the spot, without having to go through any rites of passage. I was pleasant, unjudgmental, and a doctor—and as such was called on, occasionally, to advise when riders were injured. I did not join them in any of their rides or other activities, and our mild, unexpected relation—unexpected for me, as for them—quietly petered out when I left San Francisco a year later.

  —

  If the twelve months between my leaving England and my starting my formal internship at Mount Zion had been full of adventure, unexpectedness, and excitement, being an intern there—rotating through a few weeks in medicine, in surgery, in pediatrics, etc.—was humdrum and boring by comparison, frustrating, too, because I had already done all this in England. I could not see further internship as anything but a bureaucratic waste of time, but all foreign medical graduates had to do two years of internship, irrespective of their previous training.

  But there were advantages: I could stay another year in my beloved San Francisco at no cost; board and lodging were provided by the hospital. My fellow interns, from all over the States, were a varied and often gifted lot—Mount Zion had a high reputation, and this (combined with the opportunity of spending a year in San Francisco) was a strong attraction for newly qualified doctors—hundreds applied for internships at Mount Zion, and the hospital could afford to be highly selective.

  I was especially close to Carol Burnett, a gifted black woman, a New Yorker who was fluent in many languages. On one occasion, we were both co-opted to scrub for a complex abdominal operation, though all we did was hold retractors and hand instruments to surgeons. There was no attempt to show us or teach us anything, and apart from snapping at us occasionally (“Forceps, quick!” “Hold the retractor tight!”), the surgeons ignored us. They talked a lot to each other, and at one point they dropped into Yiddish and made some ugly, slurring remarks about having a black intern in the operating room. Carol pricked up her ears at this and answered them in fluent Yiddish. The surgeons both turned red, and the operation came to a sudden halt.

  “You never heard a schwartze speak Yiddish?” Carol added—a little extra, merry dig. I thought the surgeons were going to drop their instruments. Embarrassed, they apologized to Carol and were at pains to treat her with special consideration for the rest of our surgical rotation together. (We wondered whether the episode—and their getting to know and respect Carol as a person—would have a lasting effect on them.)

  —

  Most weekends, if I was not on duty, I would take off with my bike to explore Northern California. I was fascinated by the early gold-mining history of California; I had a particular feeling for Highway 49 and a tiny ghost town called Copperopolis, which I would pass on my way to the Mother Lode.

  Sometimes I rode up the coast road, Highway 1, past the northernmost redwoods to Eureka and then on to Crater Lake in Oregon (I thought nothing then of riding seven hundred miles at a stretch). It was in the same year, otherwise monotonous with internship, that I discovered the wonders of Yosemite and Death Valley and made a first visit to Las Vegas, which one could see, in those unpolluted days, from fifty miles away, like a glittering mirage in the desert.

  But if I made new friends in San Francisco, enjoyed the city, and toured widely on weekends, my neurological training was on hold, or would have been so had it not been for Levin and Feinstein, who invited me to conferences and allowed me to continue seeing their patients.

  —

  It was in 1958, I think, that my old friend Jonathan Miller gave me a book of poems by Thom Gunn—The Sense of Movement, which had just been published—and said, “You must meet Thom; he’s your sort of person.” I devoured it and determined that if I actually made it to California, the first thing I would do would be to look up Thom Gunn.

  When I arrived in San Francisco, I made enquiries about Thom and was told that he was in England, on a fellowship at Cambridge. But a few months later, he had returned, and I met him at a party. I was twenty-seven, he was thirty or so; not such a great difference, but I was intensely conscious of his maturity and assurance, how he knew who he was, what his gifts were, what he was doing. He had by then published two books; I had never published anything. I thought of Thom as a teacher and mentor (though hardly a model, since our modes of writing were so different). I felt unformed, like a fetus, in comparison to him. In my nervousness, I mentioned to him that though I admired his poetry hugely, I had been disturbed by one of his poems called “The Beaters,” with its sadomasochistic subject matter. He seemed embarrassed and reprimanded me delicately: “You mustn’t confuse the poem with the poet.”3

  Somehow—I can no longer reconstruct exactly how—a friendship began, and a few weeks later I set out to call on him. Thom lived,
in those days, at 975 Filbert, and that street, as San Franciscans know (but I did not), suddenly drops precipitously at a thirty-degree angle. I had my Norton scrambler and, rushing along Filbert, taking it far too fast, I suddenly found myself airborne, as in a ski jump. Fortunately, my bike took the jump easily, but I was rattled; it could have ended badly. When I rang Thom’s bell, my heart was still pounding.

  He invited me in, gave me a beer, and asked why I had been so eager to meet him. I said, simply, that many of his poems seemed to call to something deep inside me. Thom looked noncommittal. Which poems? he asked. Why? The first poem of his I had read was “On the Move,” and as a motorcyclist myself, I said, I instantly resonated to it, as I had years before to T. E. Lawrence’s short, lyrical piece “The Road.” And I liked his poem titled “The Unsettled Motorcyclist’s Vision of His Death,” because I was convinced that, like Lawrence, I too would be killed on my motorbike.

  I am not quite sure what Thom saw in me at this point, but I found in him great personal warmth and geniality mixed with fierce intellectual integrity. Thom, even then, was lapidary and incisive; I was centrifugal and effusive. He was incapable of indirection or deceit, but his directness was always accompanied, I thought, by a sort of tenderness, too.

  Thom sometimes gave me manuscripts of new poems. I loved the contained energy in them—the holding in, the binding, of unruly energy and passion by the strictest, the most controlled of poetic forms. My favorite among his new poems, perhaps, was “The Allegory of the Wolf Boy” (“At tennis and at tea/Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,/But plays us in a sad duplicity”). This corresponded to a certain duplicity I felt in myself, which I thought of in part as a need to have different selves for day and night. By day I would be the genial, white-coated Dr. Oliver Sacks, but at nightfall I would exchange my white coat for my motorbike leathers and, anonymous, wolf-like, slip out of the hospital to rove the streets or mount the sinuous curves of Mount Tamalpais and then race along the moonlit road to Stinson Beach or Bodega Bay. This doubleness was assisted by my having the middle name of Wolf; for Thom and my bike friends, my name was Wolf, where for my fellow doctors it was Oliver. In October of 1961, Thom gave me a copy of his new book, My Sad Captains, and inscribed it “to the Wolf Boy (no allegorizing needed!), with alles gute, and admiration, from Thom.”

  —

  In February of 1961, I wrote to my parents that I had got my green card and was now a bona fide immigrant—a “resident alien”—and had declared my intention of becoming a citizen, which one could do without forfeiting British citizenship.4

  I mentioned too that I would shortly be taking the state boards—a fairly comprehensive exam for foreign medical graduates, to see if they were really up to scratch on their basic science as well as their medicine.

  I had written to my parents, back in January, that I was contemplating “an immense journey across the States, and back via Canada, even detouring to Alaska, between my exams and starting internship: probably around 9000 miles in all. It should be a unique opportunity to see the country, and visit other universities.”

  And now, with the state boards passed and a more suitable motorbike—I traded in my Norton Atlas for a secondhand BMW R69—I was ready to set out. My time off had been whittled down, and I could no longer include Alaska in my round-America circuit. I wrote again to my parents:

  I have drawn a great red line on my map: Las Vegas, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Albuquerque, Carlsbad Caverns, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta, Blue Ridge Parkway to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston. Up through New England to Montreal, sidetrack to Quebec. Toronto, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Chicago, Milwaukee. The Twin Cities, then up to Glacier and Waterton National Parks, down to Yellowstone Park, Bear Lake, Salt Lake City. Back to San Francisco. 8000 miles. 50 days. $400. If I avoid: sunstroke, frostbite, imprisonment, earthquakes, food poisoning and mechanical disaster—why, it should be the greatest time of my life! Next letter from the road.

  When I told Thom of my travel plans, he suggested that I keep a journal—a portrait of my experiences, “Encountering America”—and that I send it to him. I was on the road for two months and filled several notebooks, posting them to Thom one by one. He seemed to like my descriptions of people and places, sketches and scenes, and he thought that I had a gift for observation, though he sometimes took me to task for my “sarcasms and grotesqueries.”

  One of the journals I sent to him was “Travel Happy.”

  TRAVEL HAPPY (1961)

  A few miles north of New Orleans, my bike gave out. I pulled over and began tinkering with the engine in some forsaken lay-by. As I lay there on my back I detected, with some sixth seismic sense, a distant tremor, like a far-off earthquake. It advanced towards me, becoming a rattle, then a rumble, and finally a roar, culminating in the screech of air brakes and a terrific cheerful honking. I looked up, paralyzed, and saw the vastest truck I had ever seen, a very Leviathan of the road. An impudent Jonah stuck his head out from the window and hollered at me from the great altitude of his cab.

  “Anything I can do?”

  “She’s shot!” I answered. “Busted rod or something.”

  “Shit!” he remarked pleasantly. “If that breaks loose, it’ll cut your leg off! Be seeing you.”

  He grimaced, ambiguously, and maneuvered his huge truck onto the road once more.

  I rode on and on, and soon left the swampy lowlands of the Delta. Soon I was in Mississippi. The road meandered here and there, capricious and unhurried, winding through thick forests and open pastures, through orchards and meadows, over half a dozen intersecting rivers, and in and out of farms and villages, all tranquil and motionless in the morning sun.

  But after I crossed into Alabama the bike grew rapidly worse. I hung on every variation of its sound, pondering on noises which were sinister but unintelligible. It was disintegrating fast, this much was certain; but, ignorant and fatalistic, I felt I could do nothing to arrest its fate.

  Five miles beyond Tuscaloosa the engine faltered and seized. I grabbed the clutch, but one of the cylinders was already smoking by my foot. I dismounted and laid the bike out flat upon the ground. Then I advanced towards the roadside, holding a clean white handkerchief in my left hand.

  The sun was dropping in the heavens, and an icy wind sprang up. The traffic was diminishing.

  I had almost given up hope and was waving quite mechanically, when abruptly, incredulously, I realized that a truck was stopping. It looked familiar. Narrowing my eyes I spelled out its registration: 26539, Miami, FLA. Yes, that was it: the vast truck which had stopped for me this morning.

  As I ran up to it, the driver descended from his cab, nodded towards the bike and grinned:

  “So you finally fucked it up, huh?”

  A boy followed him down from the truck, and together we scrutinized the wreck.

  “Any chance of a tow to Birmingham?”

  “Naah, law says no!” He scratched the stubble on his chin, then winked: “Let’s heave the motorcycle inside!”

  We struggled and panted as we hoisted the heavy machine into the belly of the truck. Finally, it was secured among the furniture, tethered with ropes, and hidden from prying eyes by a tumbled mass of sacking.

  He climbed back into the cab, followed by the boy, and then myself, and we ensconced ourselves—in this order—along its broad seat. He gave a little bow, and performed formal introductions:

  “This is my trucking partner, Howard. What’s your name?”

  “Wolf.”

  “Mind if I call you Wolfie?”

  “No, you go right ahead. And yours?”

  “Mac. We’re all Mac, you know, but I’m the genuine original Mac! You can see it on my arm.”

  For a few minutes we drove in silence, taking stock of one another, surreptitiously.

  Mac looked about thirty, though he could have been five years either side of this. He had a vigorous, alert, and handsome face, with a straight nose, firm lips, and a clipped moustache. He could
have been a British cavalry officer; he could have played small romantic parts on screen or stage. These were my first impressions.

  He wore the peaked and crested cap all truckers wear, and a shirt emblazoned with the name of his company: ACE TRUCKERS, INC. Upon his arm was a red badge with the legend: PLEDGED TO COURTESY AND SAFETY, and half-concealed under the rolled-up sleeve, his name: MAC, entwined with a struggling python.

  Howard could have passed for sixteen, but for the set lines which arched above his mouth. His lips were always slightly parted, revealing large yellow teeth, irregular but powerful, and an astonishing expanse of gum. His eyes were of the palest blue, like the eyes of some albino animal. He was tall and well-built, but graceless.

  After a while he turned his head and gazed at me with his pale animal eyes. First he stared straight into my own eyes for a minute; then his gaze widened to embrace the rest of my face, my visible body, the cab of the truck, and the monotonously moving road outside the window. As his attention widened, so it faded, until his face resumed once more its vacant dreaminess. The effect was first disquieting and then uncanny. With a sudden horror and pity, I realized that Howard was feeble-minded.

  —

  Mac gave a short laugh in the darkness. “Well, think we make a good pair?”

  “I’ll soon see,” I answered. “How far will you be taking me?”

  “To the ends of the earth, New York anyhow. We’ll make it Tuesday, maybe Wednesday.”