by Neil Peart
Parking for the night in Ely (pronounced “Elee,” I learned from one of the BMW guys), I walked up the street to the Hotel Nevada, a 1920s relic that had survived by turning its once-elegant lobby into the inevitable casino, jammed with the flashing lights and incessant whirr and trill and ring and beep of the slot machines. Off to one side, the restaurant retained its vintage charm, with half-round booths and an old-fashioned lunch counter, the walls lined with historic mining photos. But it was open to all that noise, and the food was indifferent. I had observed back in Wendover that “People don’t go to a casino, or to Nevada, to eat, I guess,” and this place was no exception, though the cherry pie was pretty good.
The Loneliest Highway in America was having its effect on me, and that night I called several friends for solace and company, but I still felt lost and very alone. When I awoke at the Best Western “Parkvue,” the temperature was 22°F, so I decided I might as well stay for breakfast and hope it warmed up a little. Back at the Hotel Nevada, the whirr and trill and ring and beep continued, and I noted, “the fun never stops in Nevada.”
Despite the bitter cold, I did enjoy my long crossing of The Loneliest Highway in America, past sagebrush plains, juniper mountains, salt pans, dust devils, and occasional sand dunes, all unfolding before me under a crystal sky. At one point I was riding through a wide valley, a shallow concavity stretching to distant brown teeth at either end, where I could see at least 20 miles ahead of me and as far behind, and there was not another vehicle in sight. Feeling the call of nature, for some reason I was inspired to simply park the bike on its centerstand in the middle of the road, switch it off, then wander off to the side and relieve myself. Still nothing in sight, I stretched my arms and legs, my neck and back, lit a cigarette, and walked around a little, stretching and smoking.
Pulling out my camera, I took a photograph from behind the bike so that it appeared to be riding down the road by itself: the ghost rider. From then on, this setup became a “device” for me, and a source of entertainment, as every day I watched for a suitable location to take a Ghost Rider photograph, trying to capture the perfect background and, of course, an empty stretch of road.
After several peaceful, contemplative hours of steady desert riding I reached the junction town of Fallon, and suddenly Highway 50 was anything but lonely, for heavy traffic surrounded me all the way to the Interstate, and into Reno: “The Biggest Little Town in the West,” as the famous sign has it. Though always overshadowed by Las Vegas (playing, say, a tough and scrappy Jean Harlow to the flamboyant extravaganza of Mae West), Reno had a busy strip of its own, a carnival midway of flashing lights, blaring speakers, garish casinos, and dense traffic, and after the tranquility of that day’s ride it seemed like madness.
I made a pilgrimage to the National Automobile Museum, which I had visited every time the band had played in Reno, right back to the late ’70s. Back then, it had still been the personal collection of Bill Harrah, a gambling tycoon who could well afford to be whimsically acquisitive (it has been said before that gambling only pays if you own the casino). Harrah eventually filled three huge warehouses in the suburb of Sparks with something like 3,000 cars, sometimes buying them from other collectors by the train-car load, while his own restoration shop refurbished them to jewel-like perfection. His collection grew to include such whims as one of every Ford model for a span of almost 50 years, some racing cars and outrageous customs, many examples of the opulent classics from the ’20s and ’30s (both European and American), and a few celebrity cars, like John Wayne’s Corvette, Joan Crawford’s Cadillac limousine, Carroll O’Connor’s Maserati, and Howard Hughes’s Plymouth sedan from the early ’50s (another tycoon who could afford to indulge his whims, because of his phobia against airborne “germs” the car had been fitted with an elaborate air-filtration system filling most of the trunk).
After Harrah’s death, the Holiday Inn Corporation bought his whole enterprise of casinos and hotels, including the car collection, then auctioned off about 90 per cent of them — including two of my favorites, a Bugatti Type 57 Atalante with its swoopy body in a gorgeous two-tone finish of cream and caramel, and a red Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta (the “hero” of an old Rush song, “Red Barchetta”). Those treasures were gone to somebody’s private garage somewhere, probably, like so many of Harrah’s unique classics, which at least he had shared with others.
The 300-400 cars the corporation retained were manipulated into a tax credit by making them the National Automobile Museum, and the ones on display tended more toward the crowd-pleasers, the celebrity cars. Still, a representative selection was presented from different eras in full-size dioramas and street scenes, showrooms, and garages filled with period detail. Well done, and always worth a visit, but I lamented the loss of what it had been. (The ghost cars.)
Too bad he didn’t ensure its survival; but maybe he didn’t care. I understand about that. But too bad all the same. I remember the missing ones.
Yes, that last line pierced me as soon as I wrote it down.
I remember the missing ones, all right, every minute of every day. Only the previous morning I had been on the phone with the landscape architect who was designing a memorial for Jackie and Selena to be placed in the cemetery plot I had bought in Toronto. None of that had been a cheery mission. I didn’t know if such a monument would mean anything to me, or if I would ever want to go there, but I knew it had to be done, for myself and for the other grievers. To remember the missing ones.
In Reno there would be yet another poignant reminder of all I had lost. Deciding that if I was going to stop in a town like that, I would stay in the most ridiculous of its many follies, so I checked into Circus Circus, a massive high-rise with live circus acts performing among the incessant whirr and trill and ring and beep of the slot machines. Amid the din in and around Art Gecko’s Southwest Grill, an older couple at the neighboring table made friendly conversation with me, and said they were celebrating their 60th anniversary. Couples were always a torment to me, especially those who had grown old together, but I swallowed the stab of sorrow and wished them a happy anniversary.
The following morning’s ride I called “Escape from Reno,” as I wheeled out on a cold, clear day and followed a twisting little road high up to the picturesque showplace of Virginia City, quiet in the early morning, before the tourists arrived. Then I swung down around Lake Tahoe, the deep blue lake high in the forests of the Sierra Nevada, and another area that had always appealed to my inner, ideal “soulscape” of lake and forested mountains. Unfortunately, I found myself trapped in a frustrating series of construction delays, alternately crawling and walking — or shuffling along — in a line of trucks and cars.
As I straddled the bike beside one of the asphalt trucks lining the shoulder, the driver leaned out of his cab and talked for awhile about my motorcycle, and about one he was going to buy, then told me about another road I could take over the mountains that wouldn’t be so busy. Glad to escape, I turned off on Highway 89 to the Luther Pass, then on 88 to the Carson Pass, at 8,573 feet, where I climbed into thin air, glacier-scraped granite, small lakes, and tall pines. Once my nostrils flared at a tantalizing, delicious fragrance I couldn’t identify in that context, then smiled when I caught up to a line of slowly climbing hay trucks — the scent of my farming heritage.
Descending on the California side, I felt the air becoming warm at last (for the first time since riding into Vancouver nearly a month previous), and soon I was hot enough to stop and remove a few layers of clothing from under and over my leathers. The price of that comfort, however, was traffic; it seemed I had to share this more temperate and fertile state with a lot of other humans and their vehicles, all the way across the dry yellow foothills and irrigated farmlands of the northern Central Valley.
Another smell teasing the air turned out to be a truck full of garlic (probably from nearby Gilroy, the “Garlic Capital”), and when I reached the even busier Napa Valley I was surrounded by green vineyards and fragrant eu
calyptus. Turkey vultures circled high, looking for roadkill, and I reflected that, despite many cartoons of desert desolation, I had rarely seen vultures in the real desert. Of course, these scavengers of carrion would gather where they were more likely to find food, and a land with more life inevitably means more death. (Alas.)
The Inn at South Bridge in St. Helena, right in the heart of the Napa Valley, was many levels up from my recent accommodations, and I had a bright, luxurious suite that immediately invited me to stay for another night. After several nights of “humble” restaurants, I was in search of a good meal, and the lady behind the front desk suggested a neighboring restaurant of some repute, Tra Vigne. Unable to get a reservation by phone, I tried waiting at the bar, but after my desert sojourn, I was also unused to crowds — and “attitudes.”
This place very “modern California,” and jammed full of . . . modern Californians. Question: Do some lesbians dress like men just so they won’t have to dress like women? Just wondering . . .
One of the small bar tables was free, so I sat there, feeling hemmed in by people, and had a drink while I looked over the menu. I asked the bartender if I could order something, and he informed me, with a certain lofty disdain, that I could only eat at the bar, not at a bar table, because there was “no server for that area.” When I asked if I could pick up my food at the bar and eat it at my table, his nose elevated even higher, and he sniffed, “A cafeteria we’re not!”
I dismissed him as a “Californicator,” got out of there and walked down the street to the main part of St. Helena, where I found a modest-but-excellent bistro and had a fine meal right at the counter. Back at the hotel, I tried to call Brutus, for I hadn’t been able to get hold of him for a few days and was hoping to finalize our plans to meet up sometime soon. When he didn’t answer his cell phone, I left a message for him at home. I was starting to worry about him.
There were things about Brutus’s life I didn’t want to know, but I was aware in a general way that our entrepreneurial Brutus occasionally involved himself in the import/export logistics of certain herbal remedies frowned upon by federal authorities, and I knew he was staying at a motel near Buffalo working on some deal. So when he didn’t answer the cell phone, and the hotel receptionist told me he was “gone,” I feared the worst.
The next morning, I set off on a narrow, winding road through the wooded hills between the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, on another literary pilgrimage, to Jack London State Park. London had called his beloved Sonoma Valley “The Valley of the Moon,” and the park preserved a part of his “Beauty Ranch,” where he had experimented with modern farming methods in a landscape of yellow grass and live oaks. The park also contained the ruins of his dream home, Wolf House, which had been only days away from completion when it burned down mysteriously. London was deeply affected by its destruction, and by the possibility that arson might have been the cause, for he counted himself a friend to all people, and the loss is thought to have contributed to his death a few months later, in 1916.
It was the end of a life fully lived, but sadly all too brief, for he was only 40 when he was brought down by liver failure, apparently caused by years of alcoholism, overwork, and a recent addiction to laudanum and other opiates, still widely prescribed in those days. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote about “no second acts in American lives” might have been coined for Jack London as much as for himself, another “ghost writer” who burned himself out and died young.
Jack London’s published credo:I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
Than it should be stifled by dryrot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
Every atom of me in magnificent glow,
Than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
Born to an impoverished, unwed mother in Oakland, California, in 1876, London’s youth had been harsh but adventurous: an oyster pirate around San Francisco Bay, a cannery worker, a sailor on a seal-hunting voyage across the Pacific, a temporary student, an ardent socialist, and even a hobo riding the rails across America, before travelling north to the Yukon in 1897, when he was barely 20. While prospecting unsuccessfully for gold, and suffering through an endless winter of frostbite and malnutrition in the one-room cabin (the one I had seen reassembled back in Dawson), he couldn’t know he was mining the material which would provide him with dozens of stories and several novels, and unimagined fame and fortune. His first book, Son of the Wolf, was published in 1900, and he soon became the most publicized writer in the world, outshining even Mark Twain or Charles Dickens. (Commenting on London’s youthful affiliation with socialism, Twain remarked, “I hope that fellow London gets his wish for socialism — then he can send out the militia to collect his royalties!”)
Having achieved this success, however, London was too generous, and perhaps too profligate, and had to work incessantly to afford his lifestyle, which included ambitious indulgences like the building of the sailing ship The Snark, in which he and his second wife, Charmian, set out to sail around the world in 1906, a tale endearingly recounted in The Cruise of the Snark.
Even during that difficult voyage across the Pacific (ultimately abandoned due to London’s ill-health), he kept up his output of 1000 words, as he did every day of his writing life. In truth, he had to keep producing magazine stories and articles, to pay for the ship, the voyage, the construction of Wolf House, the upkeep of Beauty Ranch, the support of his first wife and two daughters, and the vast sums he gave away to friends, relations, and even strangers who wrote to ask him for money.
As to how London could maintain his fund of ideas for the dozens of magazine stories he churned out, I found an interesting clue during a later “ghost writer” pilgrimage (often an excuse for a spurious destination on my aimless wanderings). In Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the home town of America’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Sinclair Lewis, I stopped at the museum devoted to him, and saw a letter from London to a young Lewis thanking him for his latest batch of story plots, for which London was paying Lewis $50 each. To me, this was a surprising insight as to how London could keep up such a prolific output, but still — just as Shakespeare’s masterful language was often woven around second-hand plots, it did not detract from the effortless artistry with which London wrote his finest stories and novels, like The Sea Wolf and Martin Eden.
By all accounts, Jack and Charmian had been deeply in love, and had shared life in a way uncommonly egalitarian for their time. The house she lived in after his death was not far from the ruins of Wolf House, and not far from London’s grave (under a boulder in the woods, where he had asked to be buried), and she had called this stone mansion “The House of Happy Walls.” Now a museum, it was filled with souvenirs of London’s writing career, and of their travels and life together. Seeing all those relics of their vanished lives made me sad and tearful, and once again made me rail not at the futility of life, but at the futility of death.
They loved each other, did cool stuff together, but that didn’t keep him alive. Or her either, for that matter, though she lived on alone for many years (ach!).
On that weekday afternoon in early October I saw only a handful of people on the paths in the park, and the air of melancholy stayed with me as I strolled through the woods and ate my lunch beside the crumbling stone remains of Wolf House. I hiked up to see the little lake and boat-house farther up the hillside, and the small cabin where Jack and Charmian had been living when he died. Despite the somber atmosphere, in the same way that my sad time in Barbados had been brightened by birdlife, the live oak trees flickered with a wonderful variety of birds, and I trained my binoculars on eight or nine different species, from the acorn woodpecker to the elusive hermit thrush, which has perhaps the most beautiful song of any bird, a tumble of liquid notes someti
mes heard in the evening stillness.
When I got back to the Inn at South Bridge, I saw the message light blinking on my telephone, and a little alarm went off in my head, because only one person knew where I was: Brutus. When I picked up the voice-mail message, though, it wasn’t him, it was his wife, Georgia. Her voice sounded distraught, and the message was brief. “I’m at my Mom’s. I really need to talk to you.”
When I called her, her voice shook as she told me Brutus had been arrested, and “It’s bad.” I told her I would do whatever I could, and she gave me the number of a lawyer in Toronto who somebody had arranged to be involved from that end. I tried calling him, and then my own lawyer, but it was 8:00 at night back east, and I couldn’t reach anyone.
Sad, sad, sad. Now my best friend is in jail. No details, but Georgia says, “it’s bad,” and I’m sure it is.
Do everything I can, of course, but not hopeful, and this has not only darkened my day, but my life. We were supposed to meet up and ride together soon — now what? Don’t know what to do. Carry on for now, I suppose. But what little spark I had keeping me going is . . . flickering. Ach.
Also talked to Dr. Earl on the phone this morning; he figures I have an ulcer, and says take four Zantacs every night for a month. Life gets better and better. Ach.
At that point, I realized my existence had reached its absolute nadir, and my own personal hell, fittingly, was a really bad country song:My baby died, my wife died, my dog died, And my best friend went to jail So I’m ridin’ down that long, lonesome road
With an ulcer.
Anyway, there was little I could do about any of that, except perhaps to help the friend in jail, so Brutus became one of my few “missions” in life. Early next morning, I called the Toronto lawyer, Mr. Bloomenfeld, who told me Brutus had been arrested with a “truckful” of a controlled substance of a leafy green nature, and that with his two prior convictions in the U.S. for similar “lapses” (my friend and colleague Geddy once defined jail as “The House of Bad Decisions”), Brutus was in serious trouble.