Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

by Neil Peart

  I was thinking of Steinbeck regarding Salinas, of course, and it occurred to me that it would make a worthy addition to the Ghost Rider’s Tour of Ghost Writers (and that’s a book, eh?). The National Steinbeck Center, at the edge of Old Town Salinas, was the best of its kind that I’ve seen. It presented the history of the region in the conventional way (like Yuma, Moab, Yarmouth, et al.), but through the lens of Steinbeck’s writing, with imaginative selections and illustrations, from dioramas to hands-on props.

  “For reasons too stupid to go into” (Riebling quote) I ended up at a substandard motel (the Travel Inn, $35, but I found a good meal).

  And next morning, a good breakfast too, at “Tabacchi’s Family Coffey Shoppe.” Despite the spelling, it was a classic place, with a turquoise counter and booth tables, cantilever stools at the long counter, dark green naugahyde on the banquettes, and country music whining and moaning.

  And here’s my “thumbnail” map of the route I improvised coming from Salinas to here. [Hand-drawn map attached.] I know you’re impressed by all the “special effects” in this letter, but I also suspect you’ll be (secretly) impressed by this routing. Especially if you believe that I actually did it.

  Though only after a bitter flail in the morning, casting about for County Road G-17, and a couple of lesser missteps later on (those county roads are not excessively identified in the fashion of numbered signage, as you know), I managed to do all that, “and may I say, not in a shy way.”

  Don’t let me get started . . .

  Anyway, that State Highway 25 is the one we took from Coalinga [Coaling Station A, origin of town name] on Mothers Day, 1997, and it occurred to me today how spoiled we were on that tour, riding amazing roads pretty well every day (thanks to you, of course; or, if I made it possible, you made it happen), and just accepting such sublimity as normal.

  Well, now this here Ghost Rider knows better, for instead of snoozing away on a Prevost [tour bus] through the in-between miles, I’m doin’ ’em, sayin’? It makes a difference. Parts of that 25 were brilliant (several gangs of Sunday sport-bike riders had obviously made the same choice), and the variations of scenery, from foggy Mexican suburbs during my flail (a space-warp to what the real Mexico could be like: nicer!) and into Steinbeck’s Long Valley, irrigated vegetable farms on a massive scale, stretching flat and green under the fog, and so fragrant with life (rather than just “food”).

  Then up again into the yellow-grass hills, with lots of lovely twisties (and no RVs or trucks, and few cars and pickups), then down into the Central Valley: cotton, lettuce, cabbage, artichokes, almonds, vineyards, and the wide, swift-moving, and dramatic (to me) California Aqueduct, then up into the piney mountains, which is where this tale began (I think).

  Oct. 25, ’99 Yosemite

  Late the following afternoon . . .

  Back from an all-day hike up the canyon wall, gaining 3000 feet (from 4,000 feet) in four miles, and about 13 miles altogether. Pleasantly tired all over now, with a couple of blisters — probably more from the downhill, for much of it was a hardpack surface of dried mud with a dusting of powdery sand and gravel. Given the steepness of the descent, you always had to be prepared to slip, with knees bent and weight back, like a skier, and that too was tiring. Glacier Point was the goal, an overlook above most of the valley, to Halfdome and the farther, unglaciated peaks, among the chaparral, pines, and firs.

  However, the unfortunate thing was that you could also drive there, which of course most good Americans did, and they could simply park, walk (or waddle) 100 yards, look around, and drive away again.

  I have to believe they don’t share the same experience of that view, not being tired, sweaty, and footsore, but satisfied in having earned all that beauty, you know? And does your lunch ever taste good.

  You know that I’ve been talking (to myself) for a long time about turning these adventures into a book someday, and that was on my mind again today, as I wrote in my journal:

  Thinking more and more these days about the great book I’m “supposed” to be writing. Don’t know if that means anything, but the thought of trying to get everything I know (even about this trip) into a book is very daunting. Even everything I know about today would fill a good book. What I see, what I think, while I walk.

  Millions of thoughts spin out, all connected, like a tape unreeling, then as soon as I stop, all gone. Snap. Same with riding, now that I think about it.

  You know what it’s like, all them thoughts whirling out of your brain, making sense and falling into shape, and you can just see how it ought to be.

  Ah, but to “make it so,” that’s the hard part. It’s going to take a long, long time, and make a serious hermit (emphasis on both words) out of me, and force me to put into words a lot of difficult stuff, so I’ll have to make sure I’m ready, really ready, for all that.

  Not yet, that’s for sure, but maybe I’m building up to it. “Workin’ out,” eh? Now if I just had a researcher, I could get somewhere — one who’s not, like, behind bars.

  So hurry up and get out of that joint, willya? I got important jobs for ya!

  And now I’ve moved over to the bar, for the cognac I so richly deserve. Still weird to me to be in a non-smoking bar, but — it’s Kalifornia.

  And say, how do you think I feel having a best buddy who’s a non-smoking, non-drinking, celibate vegetarian? Oh, I know it’s not all by choice, and I’m sure I’ll be able to “rehabilitate” you in no time. Recorrupt you, like. (Though I’m afraid you’re on your own with the celibacy, mate.)

  More reasons to treasure the memories of that Test For Echo tour. I keep saying we were “spoiled,” but I guess that’s only so if you consider it being spoiled to have, like, a good life. Not hardly. It’s just that things have gone so downhill since then, I guess. I certainly consider that tour to be the zenith of my career, and of my life. Everything was so right, and we made the most of it. Couldn’t have done more.

  Whenever people express anything like “envy” for my present nomadic existence (except you), I soon set them straight (gently, of course). This ain’t no “joyous journey,” but a desperate, restless exile. As I said, I’d rather be sitting at home, writing a great book. However . . . deal with it.

  As we are, and will, right Windigo? (Native legend of spirit transformed by taste of human flesh, doomed to haunt the night and frighten children. See Stegner, I think.)

  And that’s it for now; I want to get this mailed. Off to Furnace Creek tomorrow, then L.A. (on the 28th now). Call me that week.

  G.R.

  Lately I had noticed another sure sign of the growth of my little baby soul — a renewed concern about the natural world I was travelling through. It will be apparent by now that I had maintained my love for nature, but that’s not the same as caring about it. After life’s betrayals had so completely undercut my faith and my ideals, for a long time I hadn’t felt any responsibility for the world around me (“Aw, save your own planet!”). However, for many years before that, such environmental and philanthropic interests had been a big part of my life.

  Every December, our bookkeeper Sheila would send me a long list of the previous year’s charitable contributions, pages of them, and I would go over it all with Selena, showing her what “causes” we were contributing to, and how much, and explaining why. Children’s diseases, environmental watch-dogs, rainforest salvation, women’s shelters, clean water for Africa, AIDS research, community programs, that sort of thing. I wanted her to know and understand my “if you do well, do good” philosophy. However, I had also believed that “if you do good, you’ll get good,” which obviously hadn’t worked out, and part of my shattered ideals meant that I remained generous to friends and street people, but lost all interest in organized charity.

  Every Christmas, Jackie used to order whole cases of food and household goods and have them delivered to the local food bank (refusing to let them publicize her, as they once wanted to do), and earlier that year Deb had told me about a phone messa
ge at the Toronto house from “Mr. Case,” wondering why he hadn’t heard from Jackie, and hoping he hadn’t offended her in some way.

  At Selena’s funeral, my brother Danny read a W.H. Auden poem, which Jackie and I later agreed to put on Selena’s memorial (not knowing at the time it would be Jackie’s memorial too — or not so soon). It was the famous lament which ends with, “Pour away the ocean/ And sweep up the woods/ For nothing now can ever/ Come to any good.”

  At the time I had certainly felt that way, as if the “end of the world” had come, so who needed stars, or oceans, or woods? Even after so many miles on the Healing Road, I still believed that “nothing now can ever come to any good,” but slowly, slowly, I was becoming interested in the health of the oceans and the woods again.

  Just east of San Francisco, on my way to Yosemite, I rode by a hideous, smoke-belching industrial park (obvious oxymoron), hidden well away from the city, and it got me thinking that just as modern people had become “separated” from natural life, distanced and desensitized from not only hunting and fishing, but from everything to do with the production of their food, the same thing was happening with industry. Increasingly, it was out of our sight, in “industrial parks,” or in unpopulated areas — not only in the West, either, for I had seen the chemical plants in the hills of West Virginia, along the lower Mississippi, and in rural areas of the Midwest.

  As I climbed the canyon wall to Glacier Point that morning, I noticed a layer of orange haze stretching across the Yosemite Valley, from rim to rim — smog. On the same hike I noticed a sign telling about someone called a Yosemite “guardian,” who had dynamited the moraine on the floor of the valley in 1890, to “lower the water table.” How did that “guard” the natural beauty of Yosemite, I wondered.

  At that same time, I had been reading Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, written in 1949, and considered to be one of the seminal books of ecological awareness. Leopold was no dilettante naturalist, but a keen hunter and outdoorsman who understood that humans were part of the natural world too. He didn’t object to the use of natural resources, but only protested against the wholesale destruction of everything around them. “To keep every cog and wheel is the first rule of intelligent tinkering,” he wrote.

  As I wandered the backroads of the West, it became clear to me that each of those roads had been blazed by a miner, a logger, or a rancher, and yet now those same people were so obviously the enemies of the land they had pioneered — especially as they had grown into impersonal corporations dedicated to digging up piles of toxic slag, clearcutting the mountain forests, overgrazing the public lands, or damming every river. In Western Canada and the United States, forests, grasslands, deserts, valleys, rivers, canyons, mountainsides, and shorelines were still being swallowed up at a prodigious rate, and no end in sight.

  “Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man,” wrote Henry Adams, and while this particular “disappointed idealist” (not to say “cynic”) had learned to accept that nature, and life, were totally random, chaotic, and heartless, “order” was not my dream, only beauty. And maybe some peace . . .

  It ought to be second nature —

  At least, that’s what I feel

  “Now I lay me down in dreamland” —

  I know perfect’s not for real

  I thought we might get closer —

  But I’m ready to make a deal

  SECOND NATURE, 1987

  Chapter 17

  TELESCOPE PEAK

  Carry all those phantoms

  Through bitter wind and stormy skies

  From the desert to the mountain

  From the lowest low to the highest high

  GHOST RIDER, 2001

  [Letter to Brutus]

  [“passport” stamp] Oct. 26, ’99 Death Valley National Park, Death Valley, CA

  Buenas Tardes, erstwhile sidekick,

  Picture this: Furnace Creek Ranch laundromat, a cinder-block unit the size of a bathroom in a wayside rest stop, in the middle of a trailer camp, 5:45 p.m. [actually 4:45, I think], sun just behind the ragged casuarinas [actually tamarisk, I think] (some kind of dieback goin’ on), and I’m waitin’ here. Finding this sweltering little relic was not unlike my route to Yosemite, but you know the gaff: couldn’t put it off another day!

  But as I’ve said before, it’s good to be here (well, not here — though it’s not unpleasant on a picnic bench facing the narrow lane between the trailers and RVs (of the ones I can see, three from Nevada, one from California, and one from . . . South Dakota. And look at that: now I’m trapped in a parenthesis inside a parenthesis. Well, I’m breaking out with one. And I’m taking you with me).

  There.

  So, a good ride today. And what made it so wasn’t just riding through the avenue of tall pines and firs in the park early this morning, or winding higher through the thinning forest with shafts of sunlight filled solid with smoke (from a “managed,” or “prescribed” fire, the signs pointed out) and then to the edge of treeline on the Tioga Pass (tie-oga, I learned), at 9,942 feet, or winding down the other side over Mono Lake, with those weird Tufa formations along the shore. Nope, the finest part of the day was coming over the next pass (Sagehen maybe?) and out into the wide, open, sagey sea. And like a sea, when you’re out there, time slows down. Every source of danger and every source of beauty is, literally, miles away.

  And when the world opened up and slowed down like that, an audible sigh and a settling of my shoulders occurred, automatically, and I felt . . . better. How long since I’ve ridden along with my legs up on the cylinder heads? Can’t even remember. Definitely not on the coast.

  [SET CHANGE]

  Now that’s even better. Dining room, with last light over the Panamints and Telescope Peak, where I hope to stand tomorrow. Between my wash and dry cycles I stopped over to the Visitors Center, and the cute ranger-babe (oh those uniforms, eh?) told me it’s about three hours up, gaining 3,000 feet in a short way (again! Parts of me are still a little sore from yesterday’s climb), then maybe an hour down, and an hour’s ride each way. This time, though, the elevation gain is from 8,000 to 11,000 feet, so that could be a bit serious. Still, gotta go for it. If I make it, why, tomorrow night I’ll have two desserts!

  I’ve been debating whether or not I should regale you with some of the meals I’m having, and I figure, hey, better you should know, or be reminded, of some of the stuff that’s out here, in the “other world,” waiting for you. Sayin’?

  Funny thing: today I thought I was taking mostly new roads, like 120 over the Tioga Pass and east into Nevada. But, then I realized that we must have taken the one that connects Coaldale Junction with the Westgard Pass, and the one after that I had taken last year, between the Sonora Pass (better than Tioga, I reckon, both for scenery and “technicality”) and Tonopah. Proof of the ceaseless freshness of the desert is that I was grooving along, quite satisfied, and then noticed one of those “historic” signs for the ruins of a ghost town called Palmetto (they thought the Joshua trees were little palms) I’d seen last year. It made me smile, and feel no less glad to be there.

  Right now, there’s an outline of paler sky along the sharp-edged silhouette of the Panamints, numinous, like.

  So, tonight we’re having a lobster taco, warm, with cold chile verde, a glass of Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay, and grilled scallops on angel hair pasta. Maybe dessert too — to “bulk me up” for tomorrow. You know, carbo-loading.

  And I have to wonder why I love this place (Death Valley) so much. Already content to be riding along in the cool sunlight, watching the sage, the scattered cholla, a herd of five wild horses as I came down 264, ranches and irrigated hay farms, mines both abandoned and active, the sudden “boundary” where the Joshuas studded the sage at a certain line of elevation going up and coming down, and just past the Cottontail Ranch (“Always Open”) at the junction with 95, the creosotes take over from sage as the “dominant biomass.”

  For the first time I took the road in from Sco
tty’s Junction to Scotty’s Castle, stopped to buy some of their cool old stickers and ask the ranger about those areas of eroded debris whose name had been eluding me for about an hour (alluvial fans, stupid), then continued down Grapevine Canyon and into the valley. I felt myself smile, and look over those stark, wrinkled hills and creosote flats, sand dunes and salt pans, and love them. Don’t know why. Well, I probably do, but if you have to ask — then I’m saving it for the real book. (Not the bootleg version I hear you’re publishing, called “Letters To Brutus.”)

  You should also know that while you’re enjoying (or enduring) my volumes of communication lately, my journal is pouting:

  “You used to write all that to me.”

  Who loves ya, baby?

  I was just thinking about how some of those other biker-guys give the rest of us a bad name, you know? This morning at the Ahwanee I woke at about 6:30, windows open and chilly, pine-scented air keeping me under the covers for awhile, and while I enjoyed that first smoke, I heard an open-piped Harley exploding, one cylinder at a time, trying with repeated blats and concussions and finally igniting into a pulsing roar of potato-potato on fast idle, then rumbling off through the woods like a flathead Ford with a broken muffler (pretty good analogy, actually).

  Then, just now, two of them show up at the dining room here, with beer-guts bulging out of their Hawaiian shirts, and when informed of the “casual elegance” dress code, they go huffing, throbbing, and blatting off to the Ranch. Low-lifes.

  Lately I’ve noticed that the more I travel, and the more people I observe at work and play, the lower my overall assessment of humanity falls. This is profound. I have always been an idealist, a believer in the “improvability” of people, and the essential goodness of most people, so this change is as profound as, say, never wearing T-shirts with stuff on them, when before I never wore T-shirts or sweatshirts that didn’t carry a message. Deep, man. If you follow me. I certainly encounter people I instinctively like, casually, and there are certainly those I know and value as “kindred spirits.” But they are few. Most people, I seem to have decided, just spoil it for the rest of us, sayin’?