by Neil Peart
And all the time we’re turning and sweeping and winding along. Then into formations of gray rocks, perhaps changing from sandstone to limestone [shale, I just learned at the Moab museum], and towards Grand Junction, tumbled boulders and dry badlands. Get the picture? Oh yeah, and in that whole 100 miles or so, I passed maybe six other vehicles. Sublime.
Then I tried to find the back way into Moab, through Cisco, but the turnoff I thought would be it had a sign, “No Access to Moab,” which was probably a lie, eh? Anyway, now I’m here, and it’s still a great little town. And what a setting. Tomorrow I’m going to ride down to The Needles section of Canyonlands, for there’s an 11-mile hike to “The Confluence” (of the Green and Colorado, of course), which would be great to see.
After that: well, I am still on my way to Vancouver, after all, so I’m trying to pick a route that will avoid the risk of snow (right now anywhere above 6,500 feet in the Cascades, so that shuts out the Sedro Woolley route, for example), and I guess, as usual, I’ll make it up as I go along. The “Jazz Rider,” improvising my way, eh?
But I want this to get mailed tomorrow (and have a Moab postmark), so I’m going to shut up now. Next time I’ll tell you about the “Brutus Scale,” in which your oil temperature gauge can tell the temperature outside. (Oh yes!)
El Viajero Fantomo
After another wonderful meal at the Center Café, a most unlikely gourmet restaurant in the middle of humble little Moab, I paid a return visit to the small museum, then returned to the excellent bookstore, Back of Beyond. This time I bought 10 “irresistible” books, most of which I boxed up and mailed to Vancouver the following morning, along with some T-shirts for Danny, Janette, Max, and the “new guy,” Nick.
On a morning of heavy rain, I rode down to The Needles area of Canyonlands National Park, through spectacular scenery of rocky mounds and pinnacles, and stopped at the Visitors Center to get some hiking information. In the gardens around it the native plants were identified with little signs, so that when I began my hike I could put more names to the scenery around me. Rabbitbrush (big, yellowish), snakeweed (small green clump), big sage (smells great in rain), peppergrass (segmented stems, small clump), four-winged saltbush (sage-green, bigger, mesquite-like).
The rain tapered off, but I was glad of the cool overcast as I began a fairly strenuous hike, scrambling up and down canyon walls and through some sandy washes between formations of eroded red sandstone and scattered junipers and pinyon pines. A dark brown rabbit crouched under a ledge, and a few small lizards warmed themselves in brief spells of sunshine.
Five and a half miles took me to the breathtaking precipice of a high canyon wall, looking down on the confluence of the brown waters of the Colorado and the green of the Green, a clear line between them in midstream. I sat down on the rim to eat my lunch and fully take in this fabled and remote site, taking my imagination back to the tales of Major Powell’s explorations in the late 19th century, from Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.
Even more than 100 years later, there was still only one other way to reach that place: by water. Far below me I saw two colorful kayaks pulled up on a sandy crescent, and two tiny figures walking around.
That night, I tried a different Moab restaurant, the Poplar Place Pub and Restaurant, and it was crowded, as the whole town seemed to be — some big mountain bike race was coming up in a few days. Oiled pine décor with white plaster, native rock-art decorations (like I’d seen inscribed on the face of Newspaper Rock, which I stopped to look at on my way back from Needles), and rock music played, “thumping quietly.”
I went to sit at the bar to eat (better light, and you could smoke), but you couldn’t drink wine there, only beer. Utah. “Separate licences,” explained the girl behind the bar. Hungry after my hike, I went to work on a big salad and shrimp scampi with pasta, but I noticed a young Jesuit-bearded, Roman-haired fellow staring at me from time to time, and soon his girlfriend came over to verify my “identity” for him. I wrote in my journal, “Now I want to run.”
Talking to my brother Danny on the phone that night, assuring him that I was still on my way to Vancouver, he informed me that Canadian Thanksgiving was only a few days away, and urged me to arrive before then, to join them for the traditional turkey feast. So for the next few days I stepped up the pace, and piled up the miles, staying mostly on the Interstates.
Oct 8 Moab — Boise 128,565 (952 kms) [595 miles]
A long day, but relatively painless. A lot of Interstate at around 140 kph [88 mph]. Busy through Price, though in other direction, and awful around Salt Lake City. Massive highway construction continues there, plus it’s Columbus Day long weekend, I’ve just learned.
Poor Utah. Growing too fast (fastest-growing state, I think I read), and no way to stop that kind of action. Turn away jobs for voters? I don’t think so. Noticeable smog there today, probably at least partly from highway construction and for notoriously corrupt Olympics too. Too bad, though. Used to be so lovely there, and the people so active. Remember days of bicycling around there and noticing every car had a bike rack and/or ski rack. Also tough for them as Mormon majority gets watered down. Others don’t necessarily share their hard-working values. Or wish to keep things nice. Neat, clean, and proper.
Reading Tim Cahill’s Road Fever avidly. So . . . relatable.
Something going on here in hotel, a hockey game in town, and appears to be a couple of bands staying here (one Australian) on night off. Now I know what it’s like to have nice hotel invaded by bunch of low-lifes!
On another rant: Might as well confess, Dear Diary, we’re worried about the drinking lately. Since summer. Definitely gone up a notch, and bears watching.
So: watch us drink . . .
Coffee in bar just as piano player goes off. Nothing else worth staying for. Creeps with cell phones, smoking and drinking aimlessly, but purposefully. Time to go again . . .
I slept poorly that night, and felt “moderately lousy” all the next day, feverish, aching mildly all over, with a knotted stomach. Still, I pressed on through another long ride (866 kilometres, 541 miles), to Vancouver, Washington, where I was able to call Danny and tell him, “I’m in Vancouver.” The other one.
A low-grade fever often has a mildly hallucinogenic effect on the brain, and as I rode through surprisingly heavy traffic on the wide open sage desert of eastern Oregon, I found my thoughts were running in abstract directions.
And for once, I wasn’t thinking about myself, but about the people around me — in the larger sense, the people of North America, and my dwindling hopes for their (our) future. (It could only have been a fever that made me stop thinking about my own life for awhile.) By then, I had travelled pretty widely in Canada and the United States, city and town and country, and I saw so many people every day, going about their lives, interacting with each other, and I realized that my overall opinion of them by that time was . . . not high.
So many men and women, young and old, looked and behaved in ways that seemed cruel (to each other, and especially to their children), petty, self-absorbed, self-righteous, and smug. “Smite the smug,” I railed in my journal, but realized they were “unassailable, by their very nature.” I sometimes found myself sharing the dark view of humanity expressed by Roger Waters in Pink Floyd’s Animals, in which he divided people into dogs, pigs, and sheep. While I would still have added another species, the few real humans who tried to look after that “barnyard” and be nice to the other animals, I had to admit that a lot of people, maybe even most, did not behave very well toward each other.
Most people spend their whole lives in a fairly narrow circle of like-minded friends and neighbors, where it is easy to accept the comforting illusion of human goodness (except for those damn foreigners). But if that insulation were suddenly stripped away, and the smug found themselves gridlocked in an eastern ghetto or south-central Los Angeles, or facing a mob of fundamentalist Muslims, their world might suddenly become a lot bigger, and a lot darker. It is a
jungle out there.
At the same time, just as during my passage along the Healing Road I had eventually reached a certain stage of “Acceptance,” however tormented, I also seemed to be gaining a sense of acceptance about the world-as-it-was. And as usual, my thoughts, my travels, my reading, and my writing all seemed to be intertwined.
Having enjoyed Alex Shoumatoff ’s African Madness a few years back, I had recently read his Legends of the American Desert, a collection of tales that seemed to be more about Mexico and New Mexico than the four actual deserts of the American West. In the book, Shoumatoff admitted that he had intended to write a “hydrography” of the Southwest, its history in terms of precious water, but kept getting “sidetracked,” and had ended up with a book that was somewhat “schizophrenic.” The writing and the stories were often excellent, no question, but in trying to capture the intricate tapestry of that vast and complicated region, he had set himself a task that was ultimately impossible — to synthesize all that material into some grand resolution.
All of those themes came together in my journal entry that evening:
It just is, that’s what the book ends up saying, and that’s the way I’ve started to feel about the world around me. It just is.
Deal with it.
I try, and at least I still have curiosity to keep me going. If not hope. That seems to be gone, with idealism and faith. No more illusions. It just is.
Deal with it.
Don’t ask me; I’m just sympathizing
My illusions are a harmless flight
Can’t you see my temperature’s rising?
I radiate more heat than light
PRESTO, 1991
Chapter 16
COAST RIDER
All of us get lost in the darkness —
Dreamers learn to steer by the stars
All of us do time in the gutter —
Dreamers turn to look at the cars
THE PASS, 1991
Once again, Vancouver was a fine resting-place for the Ghost Rider (and for “the rest of us” too), back in the familiar guest room of the little red house in Kitsilano, with Danny and Janette. Max was three now, and I enjoyed getting down on the floor with him to play with blocks and toy cars — always good for the soul. I called him “Peewee;” he called me “Uncle Funny Man.” The new arrival, Nick, was now four months old, and a remarkably placid little guy — the “Buddha-child,” I called him.
Janette’s parents, Stewart and Vera, were visiting from New Brunswick as well, so it was nice to join their family group for Thanksgiving. I was also able to get a call through to Brutus, and we had another good, funny conversation. He was always able to find the humorous side of his situation, at least on the phone. Like me, he saved his complaining for the letters.
The mid-October weather was unusually fine in Vancouver, with a succession of cool, sunny days. Active as ever, Danny and Janette took me rowing in the Burrard Inlet again, and for the first time I tried a narrow racing-type shell. On a blustery, wavy day, it was a mixed experience, given my limited technique, for when I tried to “feather” the oars on the return stroke, one or the other would often fail to clear the waves; “catching a crab,” as it’s called. Later, Janette told me she could hear my bad words carrying far across the water.
I did a little better on my first attempt at inline skating, coached by Danny, the professional trainer and master-of-all-sports (except perhaps swimming and rowing), glad I never had to “use” the protective gear Danny urged on me, the kneepads, elbowpads, gloves, and helmet.
Then there was another hike with Danny up the Capilano River to the dam, and marching with Janette through the woods with the two Labrador retrievers, black, bossy Tara and yellow, dumb Barley, and some good restaurant and home-cooked dinners. By the end of the week, my faithful steed came back clean and shiny from the new BMW dealer, John Valk, with a new battery, starter (finally succumbed to the injuries resulting from the “diesel incident” in Alberta the year before), and oil sight glass, and it was time to get rolling again.
Travelling was obviously still the best thing for me, and I had decided I would try to stay out until after Christmas again, as I had the previous year, and work my way south through the States, then maybe explore some different parts of Mexico. Again, few plans, just some possibilities. The “South Park” guys had invited me to their annual Halloween bash in Los Angeles, and I decided that was a good enough excuse to go there, so I had booked a week at the Sunset Marquis starting October 27th, 10 days away.
With the weather already “unfriendly” in the mountains, maybe I would follow the coast highway all the way down to California. Brutus and I had ridden parts of it during the Rush tour, but I thought it would be good to ride the whole way, just to be able to say I’d “done it.” People on the West Coast were forever asking, “Hey man, have you done the coast highway?”
I also phoned Steven and asked him if he might be interested in meeting me in Moab sometime soon, where we could rent a 4x4 and explore some of the remote parts of Canyonlands I didn’t dare try to reach on my own. In turn, he suggested that he might be able to borrow Shelly’s father’s Humvee later in the year, and meet me for some back-road explorations in Baja California, maybe over Christmas. That sounded interesting, and we agreed to stay in touch as I travelled.
I also talked to Liam, the band’s longtime “main man” (we just called him “the president”), and he was going to be spending a few days in Seattle, not so far away, starting a tour with another band (it was always good for my conscience to know that he, at least, was working).
Late on the morning of October 17th, I set off from Vancouver on the short ride down to Seattle, checked into the hotel where Liam was staying, the Paramount (just across the street from the old Paramount Theater, where Rush had played many times in the late ’70s — before we “graduated” to the bigger arenas — and that brought back some memories too).
Liam wouldn’t be back until the evening, so I took a walk through Seattle’s pleasant downtown and market area, with the predictable coffee shops on every corner and a lot of “hipsters” of all ages — particularly noting a 50-year-old man with thinning purple hair, and summing up with the journal note, “Seattle is so . . . Seattle.”
Liam got back late to the hotel (full of stories about the band he was working for and their meddlesome ex-stripper wives), and we decided just to have a room-service dinner and get caught up over a few drinks. It always seemed to me that nothing much happened on my travels around the continent, but that night I seemed to go on (and on) telling stories for a couple of hours, from the hurricane in the Maritimes and its effect on my ferry crossing, to the Pony Express Highway across Kansas on a rainy-then-sunny Sunday as the Midwest changed abruptly to the Great Plains before my eyes, to the abrupt left turn at Atikokan that resulted in an 8,913-kilometre [5,571-mile] crossing of “Canada,” to the glories of Moab and the myriad delights of Baja.
I hope I wasn’t too boring.
At least I didn’t have to worry about boring my friend Brutus, my “captive audience,” and the next day I started travelling with him again, seeing things and making plans through his eyes once more.
Oct. 18, ’99 Rockaway Beach, OR
Hey there Groovy Dude,
At last we’re alone again . . .
Great.
However, of course we’ll make the best of it, won’t we?
And tonight we are; you are loving this place, amigo. The Silver Sands Motel is a modest but perfectly adequate kind of place, and it is on the ocean. Outside my window, there’s a narrow strip of lawn, then some low hummocks of sand and dune grass, maybe 100 feet of smooth beach, then the surf and the curve of blue Pacific.
When I walked out there from my room when I arrived, butt and Macallan-on-ice in hand, I just stood and listened for awhile, and the Pacific makes such a wonderful music: a steady chord of mid-range breakers, high-frequency surf, and a low, powerful boom under it all. Hopefully we’ll be lulle
d by that all night long. In our dreams . . .
So. I spent an enjoyable week with the Lindley-Pearts, and found them well. Max gets cooler all the time, and their new boy, Nick (Tank), is the Buddha-child: so calm and good-humored, yet responsive (to his “Uncle Funny Man”), and he seems to embody that “Desiderata” thing: “Go placidly amid the noise and haste . . .”
That’s what he does, most of the time, and let that be a lesson to us all.
And, in fact, I have been thinking lately, or realizing, that I have adapted to a completely different mode of travelling. The Jazz Mode, perhaps, improvising, making it up as I go along, but more — responding to the other “players,” weather, roads, traffic, my “rhythm section,” you might say. As part of the “deal with it” mentality, and the necessity to adapt, a guy has to learn to improvise, rather than just playing a pre-written part.
I’ve been reading Bruce Chatwin’s excellent In Patagonia, which I’ve been wanting to get to for years, and — speaking of books — I had a nice fax back from Bryan Prince, Bookseller, and it looks as though he’s going to take care of your “six-pack” of books himself, even mailing it from Niagara Falls, New York, to avoid any unnecessary delay or hassle. I hope it works out, for there are some treasures there which might sustain you for awhile, as they did Your Humble Servant.
Glad to be here for you, brother.
And in the words of the great philosopher Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”