They say, these days, standing out on the rim of the Grand Canyon, the brightest lights in the night sky are not the stars in the heavens but the glow from casino neon in Las Vegas—one hundred and seventy-five miles away.
Lost Art of Wandering
(Highway 152, continued)
I try calling Luis again from the yellow pay phone. I’m yearning for some variation on the company I’m keeping but he’s still not there. A different woman from the first but with just as strong an accent tells me he’s down in Chihuahua now and won’t be back for at least a week. I tell her I thought it was Oaxaca where he was last and she says she doesn’t keep track of him that closely, he moves around a lot; then she hangs up on me just like the first woman did. These two must be something to behold.
There’s music and singing coming from the mission chapel so we head over there. We’re just leaves in the wind. We pass a very Teutonic-looking tourist in a neck brace and a fringed Davy Crockett jacket who’s trying to figure out his Kodak Instamatic. John stops and helps him with it. John is very good with cameras, I must admit. He loves fiddling with them, the lenses and straps and stuff. He’s a natural with cameras. The tourist guy is overjoyed that a total American stranger has stopped and gone out of his way to help him. He’s very impressed with John. I think he must be German or Dutch or gay or something. Very strong accent and he’s wearing those weird European sandals that buckle up the ankle and look like they’re made out of phony leather. And on top of that he’s wearing them over a pair of thick army-green wool socks. It’s funny but I’ve found you can actually pinpoint where people come from by the sandals they’re wearing. Like Mexicans, for instance, prefer those huaraches with black rubber soles made out of old tires. Pakistanis generally like those flimsy jobs with the leather loop around the big toe. I’ve gotten pretty good at identifying nationalities that way. Stereotyping. Of course, you’re bound to make a mistake now and then. John looks like he’s finally solved the problem with the man’s Kodak and the man is extremely grateful, trying to give John money and bowing and scraping, hauling out twenties and tens but it seems like he doesn’t quite know the difference in the denominations so he’s just holding out fistfuls of money but John won’t take it. Deep down, John is basically a very honorable guy. He has what you might call true moral fiber although it beats me where he came up with it. He’s done a lot of reading and he once attended a Krishnamurti lecture. I think it was actually a series of lectures out in Big Sur somewhere. I’m not sure. Now Dennis is telling John that he should accept the money from the German guy; we could use it for gas and cigarettes but John still won’t take it. So now the German guy tries giving the money to Dennis but Dennis says he wasn’t the one who fixed the camera. The German keeps insisting, shaking the money up and down in both fists, so finally Dennis pockets forty bucks of it and hands the rest back to him. Then John starts yelling at Dennis to give the forty bucks back so Dennis pulls it out and tries handing it back but now the German refuses to take it. He throws his hands up and steps back as though saying, “A deal’s a deal.” Now John really goes ballistic and starts screaming at the German, “Take your money back you stupid fucking Kraut! What’s the matter with you?” People are turning to stare at us now from across the plaza. Peaceful people on vacation. “Do you think Americans are all on the take? Is that it? Huh? Do you think we’re incapable of generosity and goodwill? Or is it your historical racial guilt that’s causing you to treat me like some lowlife beggar?” The German keeps smiling and nodding and thanking John then turns and walks away, just like that, leaving Dennis with the forty bucks still clenched in his outstretched hand. John snatches up the money and goes running after the guy, yelling insults all the while, but the man keeps right on walking, ignoring John and taking snapshots of the mission and the tower where Alfred Hitchcock shot Vertigo. Finally, John just throws the money at the German’s sweaty back, yelling more insults about the Third Reich, then stomps back over breathlessly to where we are. I’ve never seen him in such a state. He’s trembling now and spitting at the ground. Quite a little crowd has gathered to watch this altercation, but now, seeing that it’s not going to develop into physical violence, they disperse. Dennis says we should go and pick up the money that John’s thrown away. The German’s making no move to retrieve it and we could really use it for the miles up ahead. It’s ridiculous to leave good money lying in the dirt, he says to John. John’s eyes are glazed over as though he’s about to throw up. It’s the principle of the thing, John pants, as we watch two little Mexican kids in shorts and bare feet go running across the plaza and snatch up the forty bucks. Dennis yells at them but they just run off as fast as little ponies. Dennis isn’t about to chase them. He’s in terrible shape. We’re all in terrible shape. I don’t know how we got this way. We used to be young and vigorous; now we’re standing here like a bunch of desperate winos or something. How does this happen?
We wander our way into the little Mission chapel where all the singing is coming from. Kids are running up and down the aisles laughing and giggling while the old people stand singing “Glory, glory, hallelujah” in Spanish. We try to sing along but our Spanish isn’t that hot and religious hymns never turned me on anyway. Nobody seems to mind that we’ve just walked in and joined their ceremony even though we’re strange-looking gringos with bloodshot eyes. Maybe they’ve just grown numb to the presence of tourists in their town. Or maybe they possess true Christian spirit. Doesn’t seem like they care one way or the other. Nobody’s trying to control the kids either. They just keep running wild up and down the aisles. The priest doesn’t care. It’s great. The women all have these snow white embroidered pañuelos on their heads. The men hold their straw Western hats in front of them with both hands, heads bowed and eyes open; eyes wandering around as they sing almost mechanically. It’s beautiful, though, the singing. Even though I’m not normally moved by religious hymns. There’s a beauty to the whole simple event of it. A few of the older men have their eyes tightly shut and their lips are moving silently; speaking to the Lord, speaking very personally. No sound, while the singing surrounds them. Then the singing stops and the people all sit back down in the wooden pews. It strikes me that this moment and this repetition has been going on for centuries; praying, singing, sitting, praying, on and on like that. And here we are with nothing to hang our hats on. The kids settle down and group up with their parents and families. The priest steps up to the altar in front of a huge golden crucifix. It looks like it was dipped in caramel like a candy apple from the county fair, the whole agonized Christ and the cross and everything, as though the real Christ were suffocated under layers of goo like those ancient victims from Vesuvius. The priest adjusts the gooseneck microphone at the podium, obviously uncomfortable with technology and even slightly irritated by it. The mike makes a growling sound. The kids giggle. They remain right in the moment. No one reprimands them. Then the priest has a little coughing attack right into the microphone. He stifles it and apologizes. The kids think this is hilarious. Even some of the elders find this funny. The priest looks embarrassed and adjusts his stiff collar. Dennis leans over to me and says in a hoarse whisper: I wish I’d have been raised Catholic, don’t you? I love all this stuff. I have no idea what he means and I’m not going to ask. We leave the little chapel just as the priest gears up for his sermon.
Now we find ourselves ambling down to the rodeo grounds, having nothing better to do. Whatever happened to our jobs? Didn’t we once all have jobs? John was working in a Mexican delicatessen making up breakfast burritos with white rubber gloves on. Dennis was working as a dogcatcher. And I had something connected with the Highway Department, mowing the medians. What happened? Did we all just up and walk away from being responsible adults? It’s a mystery to me. We still have a lot of miles to cover down to Los Olivos but there’s no deadline. There’s nothing like having no deadline. John and Dennis are much better at it than I am. They seem to be able to totally accept the mutable nature of things whereas
I’m always looking for an objective of some kind, somewhere down the road. John has actually become an artist at doing nothing; totally satisfied with just being here and not worrying about the next thing coming up or stewing about something in the past you can’t do anything about anyway. The Lost Art of Wandering, he calls it. He’s put a title on it so as not to confuse it with plain old indolence. That’s what his stepfather always accused him of, he says—laziness. He’s told me that since he was about thirteen years old he’s had the distinct sensation that he’s been living in his own past and observing it, as though he were already dead. Kind of like that narrator guy in Our Town. I admire that about John even though I don’t quite get it. He comes up with some profound shit sometimes.
We encounter a strange glass display booth in front of the rodeo stands with an earthquake seismograph inside it. The whole thing is sitting on a kind of Greek pedestal as though it were commemorating something historical. There’s a handwritten sign on the glass that reads: OUT OF ORDER. We’re in earthquake country. I forget that sometimes. I forget lots of things these days then suddenly something will come back, some thought or something, almost like a picture in my head that gives me this whole feeling about pieces of the past. A past I never lived in. Like, for instance, that book Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana—what a book that was. This aristocratic New England Yankee guy who sets off on a sojourn around the Horn in a three-masted schooner clear up the entire coast of early California and writes this detailed diary at a time when Spain and Mexico owned the whole damn thing. The Hide and Tallow Days they called it where they’d toss dried-out cowhides off the cliffs down to the beach from the mission near San Luis Obispo to the schooners waiting in the cove below. Stiff cowhides sailing hundreds of feet through the blue Pacific air so they wouldn’t have to carry them down the steep incline where even burros couldn’t make it. Things like that just break my heart.
Duke of Earl
Writing to his London superiors in 1771 regarding the Appalachian border and the impossibility of keeping Scotch-Irish settlers east of an imaginary line running down the spine of the mountains; the very last English governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, wrote:
“My Lord I have learnt from experience that the established Authority of any government in America and the policy of the Government at home, are both insufficient to restrain the Americans; and that they do and will remove as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to Place: But wandering about seems engrafted in their Nature: and it is a weakness incident to it, that they Should forever immagine the Lands further off are Still better than those upon which they are already settled…. they do not conceive that Government has any right to forbid their taking possession of a Vast tract of Country, either uninhabited, or which serves only as a Shelter to a few scattered Tribes of Indians. These notions, My Lord, I beg it may be understood, I by no means pretend to Justify. I only think it my duty to State matters as they really are.”
Taos
Squawking magpie. Brilliant light. The past gone past. The past gone by. Kit Carson’s grave site on the back side of town. Forgotten, by the kid’s slide. Ragged chain link. Old Kit at fifty-nine. My passport keeps falling to the ground like a dead blue leaf. Slipping away. This brilliant sight. Golden shaking poplar. Great cottonwoods. Shaking in the sun. Trembling like the tremblers of old. Navajo. Feathered helmets. Puma skulls. This brilliant light of day. Indifferent to sunken graves. Molding stone. Weathered away where you can’t even read the names. Metal plaque honoring the hero. The scout. The man who crisscrossed the country by mule. Whose dying words were in Spanish. Graffiti knife slashes across Kit’s neck. As though he’d feel a thing. As though a vengeance could still hold power in this bright corner of buried bones and no feeling; absolutely still except for the twirling golden leaves.
My passport keeps falling to the ground. Maybe it’s trying to tell me something.
Wyoming
(Highway 80 East)
The long haul from Rock Springs to Grand Island, Nebraska, starts out bleak. After two runny eggs and processed ham I hit the road by 7:00. It’s hovering at around nineteen degrees; light freezing snow and piss-poor visibility. Eighteen-wheelers jackknifed all along the high ridges between Rawlins and Laramie. Tow trucks blinking down into the black ravines. Through wisping fog, things loom up at you with chains and hooks and cranes; everyone inching along, afraid to drop off into the wide abyss. Just barely tap the brakes and the whole rear end slides out from underneath you. I’m trying to keep two tires on the shoulder in the chatter strip at about five mph hoping the ice will get dislodged between the treads. Only radio station is a preacher ranting from Paul—something about the body as a tent; “this tent in which we groan.” Same preacher segues into a declaration that, for him, 1961 was the absolute turning point where the whole wide world went sour. I don’t know why he landed on that particular year—1961—the very year I first hit the road, but he insists this is the date of our modern dissolution. He has a long list of social indicators beginning with soaring population then family disintegration, moral relaxation, sexual promiscuity, dangerous drugs, the usual litany. But then he counters it with the imperious question: “What must the righteous do?” As though there were an obvious antidote which we all seem to be deliberately ignoring. If we could only turn our backs on this degeneration and strike out for high ground, we could somehow turn the whole thing around. It seems more political than religious. “What must the righteous do?” An “Onward, Christian Soldiers” kind of appeal. I’ve lost track of the centerline. Snow boring down into the windshield so fast the wipers can’t keep up. Your heart starts to pump a little faster under these conditions; not knowing what might suddenly emerge. Not knowing if the whole world could just drop out from underneath you and there you are at the bottom of crushed steel and spinning wheels. What must the righteous do?
Buffalo Trace
I am stuck now in a town of backyards. This is not a dream. There are no houses to speak of so it can’t really be called a town, certainly not “Our Town” or downtown Milwaukee or something identifiable like that. There is no center; no Main Street but the people stroll along as though they had somewhere to go; some destination or another—purposefully but without any urgency like they would in a Big City, hustling and bustling just because everyone else is, as though caught up in a fever they can’t escape. More like a walk in the park; meandering but not really wandering so much; not really lost like me who seems to be the only one the least bit bewildered. And it’s not as though I don’t recognize certain signs; not signs like stop signs or signals because there are none. No advertising of any kind. Very much like the East Berlin of old, before the wall came down. (Hard to believe I once drove through there in a gray Ford Anglia, reading Brecht quotes below the barbed wire while they wheeled a mirror back and forth under the axles, searching for something I might be bringing across illegally.) But now I do recognize certain backyards from years and years ago; certain fallen fences, single-track dog paths worn down through the cooch grass connecting immense vacant lots where vague footprints of very large warehouses once existed and there must have been a great traffic of oxen teams and black mules coming and going, throngs if you will; blacksmith hammers ringing down the broad avenues. And beyond these lots, fields stretching right out to the highway with volunteer oats and blue timothy undulating in the prairie breeze. And the highway itself, now broken up with tall yellow weeds and potholes deep enough to kill a Ford of any kind and, what’s even more revealing, is that now the dead highway seems to be returning to the ancient buffalo trace beneath it where someone must have tried to copy the migrations of vast herds that once blackened the landscape. Maybe they felt the buffalo knew where they were going even if they themselves didn’t have a clue.
“Our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding is but a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere.”
—Separatist leader at Plymouth, 1620
Original Sin
Now, I’ve heard this story before, bandied around, about “original sin.” The Adam and Eve deal. The snake in the garden and all that shit. She bites the apple. He goes along with it. They take the plunge and fuck their brains out. The spare rib syndrome. The pains of childbirth. They have to start hiding their genitals with fig leaves. The guilt and remorse. I’ve heard that one. My grandmother read me that story while I balanced on her knee. I’ve heard about the Pilgrim Fathers and how we descend directly down from the Mayflower folks and the Plymouth Colony and those same Puritans tramping around on Cape Cod in their funny hats, digging up Narragansett burial mounds and stealing their ceremonial corn when they’re supposed to be doing God’s work. I’ve also heard how Jesus died on the cross for our sins and rose again from the dead. The Holy Ghost. The roll away the stone. How we need to constantly beat ourselves up for being such miserable thankless Godless creatures, crawling around on our bellies like a bunch of reptiles. But how in the world are you supposed to make a living? That’s my question. How are you supposed to scrape two nickels together? I’ve tried everything: busboy, waiter, fence painter, wrangler; raking up chicken bones from fancy picnics. Nothing pays as good as shooting some fool in the head and moving on down the line. Believe me, nothing. With a check like that I can lose myself down in the Yucatán for months on end. Live like a damn potentate. Brown beauties all around me. Tequila up the ass. Float on my back in the green Caribbean. Are you kidding? One less tyrant in the world is the way I look at it. Jesus might have died for somebody’s sins but they sure as hell weren’t mine.
Sam Shepard Page 8