Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

by Neil Peart

  Then the lawyer added, “If we lose control of this case, he could end up with life without parole.” Chilled by these thoughts, I chased down my own lawyer in Florida by telephone and asked him to find “the best criminal lawyer in Buffalo,” and called Sheila at our Toronto office to arrange for Brutus’s family to be covered financially for awhile, so at least he wouldn’t have to be worried about them too.

  Not knowing what else to do, and feeling restless, agitated, and very low, I packed up and kept riding, following a route Brutus and I had taken, ironically, a year and a half earlier. North through the Napa Valley to Calistoga, through the humid woodlands of Robert Louis Stevenson State Park (another Ghost Writer) to the arid country around Clear Lake, then the little road, State Highway 16, that Brutus and I had followed to get to the show in Sacramento, and where we had nearly run out of gas, and had to buy a couple of gallons from a little repair shop in a ramshackle farm building.

  When I rode past the Arco Arena, a great hump of concrete just outside Sacramento, I was reminded of playing concerts there in years past, and my imagining of the inside of that arena alive with a crowd of thousands of screaming fans at a concert of blaring music and flashing lights, with me at the heart of it, seemed as remote and unreal as a remembered movie scene.

  That last time I had arrived at the Arco Arena by motorcycle, with Brutus (alas!), and an earlier time I had ridden through the streets of Sacramento alone on my bicycle, from the hotel to the arena. That day, back in the late ’80s, I had seen two women standing on a street corner with their children, holding up a sign that said, “Will Work for Food.” At that time, such pitiful indications of despair had not yet become commonplace, and as I passed them on my bicycle I was shocked and moved. Circling back, I gave one of the surprised women a $100 bill and rode away again, shaking my head with sadness.

  Oh, it was a sad world, and it seemed to only get sadder. As I pushed on through central California I kept thinking about all the lost ones of the world, all the ghosts, and my little baby soul was dark and cold as I rode down what I’d truly come to feel was The Loneliest Road in America.

  When I heard that you were gone

  I felt a shadow cross my heart

  NOBODY’S HERO, 1993

  Chapter 7

  DESERT SOLITAIRE

  We travel on the road to adventure

  On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun

  Like lovers and heroes, and the restless part of everyone

  We’re only at home when we’re on the run

  On the run

  DREAMLINE, 1991

  If forested mountains reflected my personal “soulscape,” there were other kinds of landscapes that appealed to me as well, and to different parts of me. The more I travelled in the four great deserts of the American West, the more I came to love them too, each in its own character: the sagebrush and juniper shrubs of the Great Basin, the creosote bushes and Joshua trees of the Mojave, the agave and smoke trees of the Colorado, and the ocotillo, palo verde, and saguaro cactus of the Sonora. I came to think of all these desert vistas as my “dreamscape,” for the awesome scale of sheer space in these arid lands of mystery, subtlety, and harsh beauty reflected a setting that was surreal, and yet familiar; foreboding, yet full of grace.

  The word “desert” refers only to the desertion of humans, of course, for the plant and animal life in these regions is rich and enchanting, and perfectly adapted to what Mary Austin called “The Land of Little Rain.” Consider the humble creosote bush, a raggedy dark-green shrub which dotted the high Mojave desert by the billions, all evenly spaced (its roots were thought by some scientists to emit toxins which prevented any other plant growing too near), and giving off a pungent scent that filled the air after a rainstorm (the source of their name). Taken all together, the countless creosote bushes not only represented the largest biomass of any life-form in the West, but certain colonies of creosote were also thought to be the oldest living things on Earth, spreading from the same rhizome roots for 10 or 12 thousand years.

  The more you studied the desert, the more you saw how alive it was, seen and unseen. Coyotes, tarantulas, crows, gila woodpeckers, horned larks, rabbit-brush, burro-weed, all the different cacti, and sometimes even flowers — the roadside occasionally glowing with the white lily-like trumpets of the sacred datura, or the delicate red blossoms of the tall, slender ocotillo. Because these apparitions were rare, sometimes occurring only once a year, their presence was felt more deeply than a meadow of wildflowers in the prairies or eastern woodlands.

  Riding a motorcycle on an empty desert two-lane also had a dream-like quality. No traffic to threaten or distract, no tight, blind corners through the trees, no worries about gravel on the pavement or stalled trucks hidden around a fast bend. Everything was open, every source of danger was, literally, miles away, and so was any source of beauty. The landscape unfolded in a slow tableau as I rode toward the next rise in the road, or the next jagged range of mountains, and there was plenty of time to look around at the big picture as well as the details, resting my legs on the cylinder heads and letting it all come toward me.

  On the run from overcrowded California, and full of worry about Brutus sitting in some hell-hole of a jail in Buffalo, I headed east again, toward the mountains and the desert. Since I wouldn’t be meeting up with Brutus for awhile, I had decided to make a rendezvous with Jackie’s sister, Deb, her partner, Mark, their two-year-old son Rudy, and bull terrier Dexter, who were also travelling through the West in a big rented RV.

  In the past year and two months Deb too had been trying to live through her grief over Jackie and Selena, and in some ways her loss was as great as my own. She had lived with our family for about 10 years in Toronto, after all, so she had been very close to both her sister and her niece, and at the end, it had been Deb and me who had held each of Jackie’s hands and watched her take her last breath in the hospital in Barbados. So she and I understood each other.

  I had been calling her often on my own travels, both at her home and on their cell phone in the RV, and we had agreed that we would meet up as soon as they got out to my “neighborhood,” anywhere in the West. When I had been feeling crowded and aimless in California, I decided I didn’t have anything more important to do than get back to the desert dreamscape and ride 1,000 miles across Nevada and Utah to visit them. A mission as good as any for the Ghost Rider.

  After a couple of hours I made it back to the Sierra Nevada, and on the long climb up Highway 108 I stopped for breakfast in the town of Sonora (during the California gold rush after 1849, one of the wildest, most lawless places in the West, but now a sleepy little mountain town). I was reminded again of Brutus when I saw a group of motorcyclists walking away from their parked bikes, obviously out for a Sunday ride together. One of them invited me to join them for breakfast, but I declined, a little wary of their “colors” — their vests and jackets advertised one of the Christian motorcycle clubs (of which there are several). As wary as I have always been of proselytizers, in the wake of what “the gods” had put me through, I was even less open to theological discussion. Whatever deity people tried to hold up as a metaphysical explanation, justification, or consolation, as far as I was concerned none of them had been very good to me. Lacking the patience or blind faith of Job (or having failed the “test of faith”), I had no use for Him, or Her, or Them.

  Before leaving the restaurant, I put on my long underwear under the leathers, and dug out my heavy winter gloves and plastic rainsuit, for I was heading up to the Sonora Pass, one of the higher passes in the Sierras, at 9,624 feet. It would be cold up there now, in early October, and in just a few weeks, when the snow started to fly, the pass would be closed for the winter. The ride up (through Harte Twain, a doppelganger ghost-writer town named after Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who had both written famously of the gold rush days) carried me into my mountain soulscape on a glorious day, clear and cold, the road winding endlessly up to the high pass and down again.
On the far side of the Sierras, I looked down over the blue expanse of Mono Lake, eventually picking out the sculptural peaks of the tufa formations along the south shore, and beyond, the dreamscape of the high desert.

  Mono Lake was a rare example of a unique, desolate area that had escaped being destroyed by thoughtless exploitation, if only narrowly. In the ’70s the lake had been rapidly dwindling, siphoned away to the voracious thirst of the ever-expanding megalopolis of Los Angeles. However, a campaign to save the lake had gained enough publicity and support to sway public opinion, and Los Angeles had been obliged to stop its “piracy,” and even return the streams that fed the lake.

  In the late 1800s, Mark Twain had written a prescient observation about the place of water in the West, “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” So it has been throughout the 20th century, with virtually every western river dammed and distributed among different states (and sometimes into Canada and Mexico), every aquifer pumped up from ever deeper underground, until it seems as though every single drop of the most precious commodity in the dry western states has been gathered, rerouted, argued over, and, ultimately, subsidized by the federal government.

  If Mono Lake had been saved for the present, Owens Lake, just to the south, hadn’t been so lucky — in fact, it was no longer a lake at all, but a white, mineralized playa. The whole Owens River system had quite literally been stolen by the City of Los Angeles at the turn of the century, when the city’s phenomenal expansion had far outgrown the tiny Los Angeles River beside which it had first grown (as the “Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de La Reina de Los Angeles,” or “town of our lady of the queen of the angels”). The city’s first water commissioner, William Mulholland, was charged with finding a new supply, and he set out in a horse-drawn wagon across the Mojave to the Owens Valley. The Owens River delivered water from the Sierra Nevada snowmelt and the White Mountains in Nevada, and emptied into Owens Lake, which was surrounded by irrigated farms and orchards, and even plied by steamboats serving the nearby mining areas of Death Valley and the Panamint Valley.

  Within a few years, the majority of the land surrounding the river and lake had been bought up, surreptitiously and even fraudulently, by representatives of Los Angeles, and a vast aqueduct was built to carry its water across the desert to the thirsty city. By all accounts, Mulholland himself was a dedicated civil servant, from humble beginnings as a ditch-digger to ultimately holding the whole Los Angeles water system in his head, and he did not profit from the schemes that grew around his public works. When he opened the aqueduct, he gave perhaps the shortest dedication speech ever, pointing to the water and saying, “There it is. Take it.”

  Others were less civic-minded, however, including the mayor at the time, who bought the only land in the Owens Valley suitable for a dam site, and the Otis and Chandler families, owners of the Los Angeles Times (which had campaigned loudly for the bond issue to pay for the project). Together with other admittedly far-sighted capitalists, they bought the dry, worthless land of the San Fernando Valley, then used the “excess” water from the aqueduct to irrigate what would become the most lucrative citrus groves, and later, real estate, in the West.

  Mulholland, meanwhile, ended his life in disgrace, after a dam built under his supervision, in San Francisquito Canyon, collapsed one night during a flash flood and caused huge destruction and loss of life. In modern times, he is chiefly memorialized by the famous Mulholland Highway, a scenic two-lane winding along the crest of the Hollywood Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains.

  In the main town of the Owens Valley, Bishop, I stopped at a gas station and removed a few inner and outer layers, then rode south to Big Pine and turned east on California 168, a little road that Brutus and I had taken on our first trip to Death Valley, during the Test For Echo tour. Twisting and climbing on an almost empty two-lane of perfect pavement, squeezing down to one lane between the boulders at Westgard Pass, then two more 7,000-foot passes at Gilbert Summit and Lido Summit, I came down into the high desert of creosote and Joshua trees, cool and sunny, and across the line to Nevada.

  At the junction with 95 I came upon the Cottontail Ranch (“Always Open”), which was actually a brothel, with a big gravel parking lot out front where a couple of semis and a few cars were the only business that afternoon. (“Didn’t stop,” I noted.) Heading north through the near-ghost-town of Goldfield to the junction with the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, I decided to look for a room in the little town of Tonopah (the “pah” suffix means “water” in Shoshone, and thus shows up regularly in place names in the arid regions of the Great Basin, like Ivanpah, and Pahrump — which must be the Shoshone equivalent of Soggy Bottom).

  Tonopah was a little town, but big enough to have a decent Best Western motel and a cozy little Mexican restaurant, Su Casa — recently opened in a time-honored location that had obviously served “good basic food” under several names before, with the same decor and fittings of naugahyde, formica, chrome, paper napkins, and plastic water glasses.

  Tonopah was big enough to have street crime too, for I noticed two boys, 10 or 11 years of age, playing around the parking lot that evening, and the next morning when I went to check my tire pressures I saw that the valve caps were missing. An exotic souvenir for these small-town boys no doubt, a harmless prank, but I was forced to keep my speed down on those wide-open desert highways in fear of the unsecured valves suddenly letting go from centrifugal force. Not until Utah did I encounter a garage big enough to sell me a couple of valve caps (for fifty cents), and then I felt I could speed safely.

  From my journal for that day, October 10th.

  Cold morning, but clear and bright, with beautiful landscapes of vast high desert and rugged, folded peaks, their features shadowed in morning sun. Swallow-like birds [horned larks] all over the road, flitting up ahead of me, often missing by inches. Few cows on the road too.

  I couldn’t resist stopping for breakfast in Rachel, Nevada, a tiny cluster of prefab buildings and mobile homes on the “Extraterrestrial Highway.” Rachel announced itself by a sign reading, “America’s UFO Capital: Aliens Welcome,” and the souvenir stand in the restaurant was filled with such related merchandising as alien-shaped guitar picks and UFO bumper stickers and coffee mugs. Rachel’s proximity to the Nellis Air Force Range (including the legendary, perhaps mythical, “Area 51”) and the Nevada Test Site attracted a certain fame based on reports of strange flying objects which might have been “reverse engineered” from captured space ships, such as the one allegedly collected at a crash site near Roswell, New Mexico. Whether or not you “want to believe,” it’s all interesting stuff.

  Equally interesting to me was observing the kind of people such myths attracted. The walls of the restaurant, called the “Little Ale’Inn” (ouch), were lined with cartoons and slogans disparaging the government, the president, his wife, the Bureau of Land Management, gun control advocates, and anyone else seen to be interfering with western “freedom.” (The so-called fierce independence of the ranchers of the western states toward the federal government, upon which they depend for subsidies and free rights to over-graze federal lands, has been described as, “Leave me alone, and give me more money.”)

  Sign above bar: “Thank you for holding your breath while I smoke.” Like the bed and breakfast owner I read about in Alaska: “Sure there’s a non-smoking area — outside!”

  Passed Warm Springs (stream steaming) and Five Mile Ranch, where Brutus and I “rustled” gas that time.

  That reference goes back to the Rush tour again, in the spring of ’97, when Brutus and I were riding across the United States on our second cross-country blitz (coast to coast in five days). Apparently we still hadn’t learned to apply a little healthy skepticism when looking at maps of the American West — not only might a name on the map not represent a gas station; it might not represent anything.

  So when Brutus and I pulled out of Rachel, Nevada, that morning, we decided not to bother refueling yet. We figured we had
another 60 miles worth, and could easily make the next town on the map, Warm Springs. However, the next stretch of highway was straight, deserted two-lane, and we were lured into opening our throttles wider and wider, until we were cruising in formation at 100 miles an hour. High speed meant high fuel consumption, and our gas gauges sank almost visibly, until I glanced down to see the bright yellow light of the reserve indicator glowing.

  Then suddenly my eyes froze on the road ahead, and widened in disbelief. An instant fear-response made me back off the throttle without even thinking about it, and I stared ahead at a huge black shape materializing from behind a rise in the road. It was a jet fighter, from the nearby Air Force base, and its menacing shape seemed to hover in front of us, then bank sharply and speed off to the south. The pilot must have decided to have a little fun and throw a scare into us; and he succeeded. (I realized later that my precognitive alarm at this sudden apparition was the conditioned response to “COP!”)

  When we got to Warm Springs, of course there was no one there. We pulled into a gravel parking lot beside a couple of deserted buildings, and when we shut down our engines, we heard only the wind. We looked at each other, then climbed off the bikes, took off our helmets, and had a smoke break. Now what?

  Brutus spotted a payphone on a wall, and leafed through the phone book for a gas station we might be able to pay to bring us gas, but none of them answered. A pickup with a horse trailer pulled into the parking lot beside us, and a rancher in late middle-age, a younger woman, and an adolescent girl climbed out and opened the trailer to release their four horses, giving them some air and water on the shady side of the trailer. While Brutus worked the phone, I went over to ask the rancher if he knew of any gas stations nearby. The woman was spreading a foil-wrapped tray of fried chicken on the hood of the pickup, and as we talked it became clear that she was his daughter, and the girl was her daughter.