Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

by Neil Peart

  Getting spoiled, not appreciating that I sometimes ride for hours without stopping at all. Except maybe for a cattle drive! (As today.)

  I’m spoiled also by weather. Saw a single cloud today and thought, “What’s that, a snowy peak?”

  Had to stop to photograph that sign, “WARNING — WINDING ROAD FOR 77 MILES.” Oh no!

  Meant to note that after the second time I saw an antique shop called “Thistle Dew,” I started to wonder why. Then I got it: “This’ll do.” (I guess?)

  Two 8,000-foot summits today, and darn cool they were too (in both senses). Snowy peaks of May a year ago [just over a year; seems impossible!] all bare now except for few small patches on north faces.

  Passed 20,000 kms [12,500 miles] of this journey today, after 41 days.

  After another night interrupted by a stomach “interval,” an hour of wakefulness and dark thoughts, I got up early and decided to try a hike along a trail which traversed the ski trails to the summit of Mount Baldy, just the other side of Ketchum from Sun Valley. Parking the bike at the ski lodge, I began the long, relentless ascent of a constant-grade trail which led steadily up through forest and open ski runs, a two-and-a-half hour slog from the trailhead at 5,700 feet and climbing to 9,150 feet at the summit, called The Lookout, where I stopped to eat the lunch I had brought from the hotel.

  From the deck of a cabin at the top of a ski-lift I sat and looked around at the valley over half a mile below, and the cutting edge of the aptly named Sawtooth Mountains under dramatic cumulus clouds. A sudden roll of thunder rumbled in the distance, sounding like dynamite at first, and I watched a storm pass to the north, trailing veils of dark rain. When I felt the wind around the cabin begin to pick up in chilly gusts, I was smugly glad I had brought my rain jacket, but when I reached into my pack I discovered I had left it at the hotel. Fortunately I was able to make the hour-and-a-half descent to the motorcycle and the short ride back to the hotel before two sharp peals of thunder heralded a sudden, brief shower outside my room.

  Next morning I started out riding eastward on the Sun Valley Road, pausing for a moment at the Hemingway Memorial, a bronze bust in a grove of trees by Trail Creek. Ernest Hemingway ended his life in 1961 with a shotgun blast to the head in the front hall of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, near Sun Valley. He is buried under a plain stone slab in the local cemetery, beside his fourth wife, Mary. At the end he was ill, feeble, and suffering from paranoia and the effects of electroshock therapy. Earlier that year, he had spent days trying to write a simple reply to an invitation to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, and perhaps he decided that if he couldn’t write anymore, he couldn’t live anymore.

  A Rush song called “Losing It,” from 1982, opens with a verse inspired by Hemingway’s sad end, attempting to express the frustration of being unable to do something which, to him, was more important than life itself: “Sadder still to watch it die, than never to have known it.”

  The memorial itself displayed an inscription Hemingway had written as a eulogy for a local friend.

  Most of all he loved the fall

  The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods

  Leaves floating in the trout streams

  And above the hills, the high, blue, windless skies

  Now he will be a part of them forever

  On my solitary travels I often found myself tracing, and even searching out, the ghostly footsteps of deceased writers: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Jack London, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound (born in Boise, of all places), Edward Abbey, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stegner, Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Ernie Pyle, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote (around Garden City, Kansas, where he had researched In Cold Blood), and, down Mexico way, B. Traven and Malcolm Lowry. All greats, and all gone. Ghost Writers. I felt the presence of a few living writers too, in the places they had “illumined:” Annie Proulx, William Least Heat Moon, Robert Pirsig, Cormac McCarthy.

  The quasi-nostalgic pang I sensed while travelling through these haunted locales was akin to something I sometimes felt in historical settings I meandered into on my travels, places that marked the passing of other ghosts — the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express Trail, Lewis and Clark’s path to the Pacific, scenes of tragedy like Wounded Knee, or beside the Pacific Coast Highway in Oregon, a more personal memorial to a young man who had been swept off the rocks and out to sea by a rogue wave. Sad, sad, sad.

  After my pilgrimage to the Hemingway Memorial I had intended to try an unpaved road leading east over the Pioneer Mountains, but it didn’t look good. A steady rain began to fall, and the sign, “Not Maintained for Passenger Vehicles” meant what it said; the dirt surface was soon awash, and fist-sized rocks rolled down the bank and across the road in front of me. I turned around, riding back through Ketchum and down through Hailey.

  The rain tapered off into a cool, windy morning, though my mood remained dark. At Craters of the Moon National Park, I paused briefly to smoke a cigarette and look over the black fields of rippling lava, then turned westward again, with another pause to look at what the sign claimed to be the highest sand dunes in North America. Like a mirage among the sage and grasslands, the sharp-edged, pale brown pyramids of the Bruneau Dunes rose to 700-foot peaks against the gray sky. Then onward, out of Idaho into a corner of Oregon, past areas of irrigated farmland and eroded canyons, under clouds high and low.

  Turning south on the two-lane blacktop of Highway 95, I rode for hours on a straight, empty desert road with hardly another vehicle in sight. Despite the perfect conditions to make time, I tried to keep my speed down, for the state of Oregon had found it prudent to post a 55 mph limit, though as soon as I hit the Nevada line, it rose to a more reasonable 70.

  Oregon could be maddeningly paternalistic that way. Sam Hill, lobbying for his highway back in 1912, had come up against the same “bewildering mix of conservative and liberal,” and Oregon’s governor had described his citizens to Sam as “fine, but damned peculiar.” (However, the governor also assured him, “they will follow you because you smell of money and have held the Queen of Romania’s hand.”)

  Although modern-day Oregon’s progressiveness was often admirable, that same liberal-conservative (or conservative-liberal) mindset could also tend toward the presumption that its citizens (and visitors) weren’t ready for too much freedom. The unreasonably low speed limits were one example; another was the statewide ban on self-service gas stations, presumably because people were not responsible enough to fuel their own vehicles without the risk of spilling fossil fuel and causing fires and environmental degradation. Or maybe it was designed to increase employment at the minimum-wage level.

  Like most motorcyclists, I prefer to pump my own gas, so I can fill the tank as full as possible without overfilling it until gas spills down the side of the hot engine — risking fires and environmental degradation. A fill-up was also an opportunity to look over the machine, check the oil level in the sight glass, inspect the tires, have what pilots call a “walkaround.” So, in the spirit of Thoreau’s tradition of civil disobedience, when I pulled into Oregon gas stations I tended to take matters into my own hands: unhook the nozzle, turn on the pump, and do it myself. (You’ve got to resist oppression!)

  And on a road like Highway 95, I kept a careful eye on my fuel level, and took advantage of gas stations when I found them; they could be scarce. Just after a fuel stop at the Nevada border town of McDermitt, I pulled to the roadside for a break beside a “historic site” sign, and read that the nearby Owyhee River had been named as a corruption of “Hawaii” by Hudson’s Bay Company trapper Peter Skene Ogden, who had sent two Hawaiian trappers (?) there to hunt, where they were promptly killed by Indians. Another ghost story.

  My destination, partly by design and partly by default (for there were few other choices in sparsely populated northern Nevada), was the little town of Winnemucca. The “design” part of this choice was inspired by a song Brutus had introduced me to called “I’ve Been Everywhere,” as performed by Canada’s Hank Snow. Perhaps the ultimate hobo song, mayb
e even the ultimate road song, it opens with the lines, “I was totin’ my pack, along the dusty Winnemucca road.” (Brutus and I canvassed truck drivers and the road atlas for days before we discovered Winnemucca was in Nevada.) Then it builds to a rapid-fire recitation of cleverly linked place names:Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota

  Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota

  Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma

  Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma

  Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo

  Tocopilla, Baranquilla, and Padilla — I’m a killer

  I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere, man

  Breathed the mountain air, man

  Crossed the deserts bare, man

  Of travel I’ve done my share, man

  I’ve been everywhere

  And on for another three or four verses. It took me awhile to get even one verse planted in my head, and to deliver it in one breath, but it was a great number for in-helmet “recitation” (not to dignify my vocalizations as “singing”), especially on an empty two-lane leading endlessly across the wide open spaces of the Great Basin desert — to Winnemucca.

  The “dusty Winnemucca road” lived up to the song’s description, with a stretch of modest sand dunes spilling onto the pavement. But my destination, after all, was just a dull little town on the Interstate, and a Red Lion motel built, like nearly every hotel in Nevada, onto a big casino. Despite my continuing mood of doom and gloom, I had come to appreciate the long open stretches of two-lane highway across the sagey sea and mountain-studded plateau of the Great Basin, but the towns and cities were another thing. I liked the natural face of Nevada, but was not as impressed by the human face.

  At the Red Lion in Winnemucca I stood in line waiting to get into the hotel restaurant beside a hyperactive young brat harassing his mother for coins, while she ignored him and mechanically fed the “Wheel of Fortune” slot machine. When I finally got a table, I noted,

  Amazing quantities of flab here — big guts and big butts. (And big mouths, behind me.) All must die. Foul mood all day, not helped by this scene.

  572 miles for this? Well yeah. Had to really. (Never mind why.)

  From Winnemucca, I decided to head in the vague direction of Salt Lake City to get some service done on the motorcycle. But it was the weekend now, so there was no reason to hurry there. On the map I saw the Bonneville Salt Flats, and decided to have a look at that attraction, and to aim to spend the night in the nearby little town of Wendover.

  My route was far from direct, however, describing a big circle through central Nevada by heading south from Battle Mountain through Austin Summit, then east to Ely on a long stretch of Highway 50, then north on long, long Highway 93. The day was another schizophrenic Nevada experience, 436 miles of empty roads through the elegantly bleak high desert, only to arrive at another destination of shabby glitter, electronic buzzers and bells, and lifeless humanity.

  West Wendover, Nevada, sprawled across the state line from Wendover, Utah, but the “action” was all on the Nevada side, of course — flashing lights atop a row of casinos, some with massive hotels attached. On a Saturday night, the huge parking lots were filled with pickups with Utah license plates, as the sin-deprived “jack” (lapsed) Mormons flocked to this podunk Las Vegas for a weekend of (presumably) guilty pleasures.

  Many of the hotels were completely full, and I settled for a Super 8 motel — mediocre, though I joined their special club (as John Ellwood Taylor) and received a 10 per cent discount that night, and for every stay thereafter — then was drawn by curiosity to walk over to the Rainbow Casino next door. The giant lighted sign out front advertised performances by the veteran San Francisco band Starship (formerly “Jefferson”), and the ’60s revivals of Jan and Dean and the Lovin’ Spoonful.

  Hoping to find some dinner, I walked into a loud, bright casino the size of several warehouses, filled with flashing neon and mirrors and thousands of blaring slot machines, blackjack tables, and a couple of shiny plastic restaurants tucked into a corner, like the afterthought they surely were.

  I was powerfully tempted to escape this madness for the comparatively normal Burger King across the street, but I waited in line for a bad dinner at a plastic lunch counter, then hung around to hear the Lovin’ Spoonful perform in a small bar open to the vast casino, their mid-’60s hits punctuated by the bells and buzzers of slot machines and P.A. announcements.

  The band consisted of the original bass player and drummer, who was now the singer, autoharpist, and tambourine player (and quite good in all capacities), augmented by a younger drummer inside a plastic box (for sound isolation), a female guitarist who doubled on keyboards, and a guy who had apparently replaced Zal Yanofsky, the original guitarist, back in their heyday. Their best-known member and original lead singer, John Sebastian, was conspicuously absent, but they played competent versions of all their hits, plus a few others by contemporaries like The Association (“Cherish”), and the Left Banke (“Walk Away Renée”). Despite the distractions of glaring white lights and electronic machines and voices, the older musicians seemed to be enjoying themselves, the younger ones worked hard, and the crowd of maybe 200 middle-aged listeners seemed to appreciate hearing “Summer in the City,” “You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice,” “Nashville Cats,” “Do You Believe in Magic,” and “Jug Band Music.”

  Essentially, I was seeing a bunch of regular people out for a fun weekend, I guessed, but the whole atmosphere felt so strange to me. Either all this was alien, or I was. Restless and downhearted, for three long weeks I had been travelling alone, covering thousands of pointless miles from the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Idaho into the sagebrush desert of the Great Basin in eastern Oregon and a large circle of Nevada. The Ghost Rider, speeding through a land of sparse vegetation and bony mountain spines under vacant skies, searching for the Healing Road.

  Earlier that day, I had spent several hours riding east on Highway 50, which meanders across the width of Nevada, and that evening, I made a note about its nickname, then added a sad reflection.

  “Highway 50 called ‘The Loneliest Road in America.’ I know.”

  Next morning, I set out to see the Bonneville Salt Flats, where every year, the Land Speed Trials attracted a host of outlandish machines attempting to set new records in various classes — from jet-turbine cars to streamlined motorcycles. All that sort of thing had fascinated me as a boy, and I thought I would indulge this nostalgia by having a look.

  But when I rode up the narrow, raised access road to a large sign marking the spot, I found myself surrounded by water. The sign informed me that the speed events ran in summer, “before the rains,” and even though in such an arid region the rain might only come twice a year, when it did fall it tended to collect on the hard surface for days and weeks, even if only a few inches deep.

  A late-model sedan with rental-company stickers parked beside me, and a middle-aged man with a heavy German accent looked around, then said to me, with a Teutonic frown, “It’s a speedway for ships.”

  Backtracking into Nevada to the crossroads of Oasis, I picked up a lonely little road running northeast to Utah again, blasting along through threadbare, rugged rangeland on a cold and breezy day. I fell into a great mental groove, “drifting away into the zone, thoughts far away while ‘main brain’ handles the road — until wind demands total focus.”

  Intermittent rain harried me down the Interstate to Salt Lake City, where I checked into the Marriot early enough to catch up on my laundry and phone calls. Brutus assured me he was still going to meet me, and said he just had to “take care of some business first.” I also talked to my Mom, and tried to sound cheerier than I felt.

  The Weather Channel outlook was ominous for the next few days, with snow in the mountains and most everywhere to the north and east, so I had some thinking to do about my immediate future. I had thought about heading back into Montana, and maybe to Yellowstone National Park, but it appeared that for at least a few days, the high pas
ses in between would be more welcoming to a snowmobile than a motorcycle.

  The hotel was under invasion from an army of mutual-funds brokers having a “convention” (translated, as usual, as “party”), and I had been placed right next to one of their “hospitality suites.” Booming voices and forced hearty laughter rattled the walls, and I pulled out my handy motorcycling earplugs and carried on reading Jack London’s Northland Stories. In the hotel restaurant, I had overheard one of these broker-jokers at the next table going on and on to his dinner companions about the details of his running: his best times, his heart rate, his endorphins, and so on until he bored me as much as he must have bored his tablemates. Then he started going on about his daughter, Rhiannon, and I sneered to myself, “You named your kid after a Stevie Nicks song? Say no more.” (Jealous, jealous.)

  Eventually the mutual funds “hospitality” in the next room ran down, and the partiers — I mean conventioneers — went off to drain another bar, so I was able to get to sleep and rise early to head to the BMW dealer for an oil change, new tires, and a loose exhaust system repair. Brutus and I had stopped at BMW of Salt Lake during the Rush tour, and of all the dealerships we visited we found them among the most friendly and knowledgeable, so I was glad to return.

  A long séance with the map and the Weather Channel had told me to head back west again, away from the snow, and in early afternoon I rode out of Salt Lake to Nephi and picked up Highway 6, The Grand Army of the Republic Highway, and then Highway 50, The Loneliest Highway in America, this time to take it all the way across Nevada. A sign warned, “No Services for 88 Miles,” and true enough, there was nothing until the Nevada border (predictably, a casino). The wind was bitterly cold on the high Great Basin desert, driving through every pore of my multi-layered clothing, and the forecast was even colder overnight, well below freezing everywhere in the Intermountain West.