by Edward Abbey
The ferry boat thrashed clear of the slip, chugged slantwise across the Hudson toward Hoboken. The roar of the millions faded away, the water hissed and slapped at the advancing boat and from the receding slabs of Vampire City came only echoes—the cry of tugboats, the bray of ships, the scream of gulls.
Henry looked away from the city and down at the water. Floes of ice, sulfur-colored, glided by under the bows of the ferry.
Spring breakup. A thrill of longing coursed through his nerves. He raised his eyes to the red ruin of the sunset and saw, beyond Hoboken, beyond Newark, through a veil of smoke and gas, the slender silver crescent of the new moon, the dim but hopeful beacon of a western star. Courage braced his heart.
It was time to go.
VII
There was a bitter scene. Naturally.
You wretch. You snake. You coward. You schmuck. You goy. You deserter. You traitor. You toad.
He urged her to come with him. They’d manage. There was room for a baby in the ranger’s little housetrailer.
Live in that wasteland? Me? With you? With a tiny baby? Thirty miles from the nearest doctor? You think I’m insane?
He’d rent her a room in town.
Rent a room? You mean an apartment? On your seasonal ranger’s salary? You cracking up, Henry?
Okay, he’d get a big wall-tent, set it up in one of the unclaimed plats of public domain close to town. Beautiful places: Arsenic Springs or Skull Canyon or Deadhorse Gulch or Rattlesnake Ravine or Death Hollow or Scorpion Ledge or Skeleton Flat or Dungeon Creek or Quicksand Draw or Stinkwater Gap or Alkali Sink—whatever, take your pick, you’d love them all, great motifs for an artist.
You’re crazy. You’re a fool. And me with my father dying and the baby crying and you can talk like that?
Your father’s been dying for five and half years. He’s always dying, he’ll never be dead.
You scum. You utter shit.
The baby bawled in its bassinet. The fragrance of wet diapers hovered on the air, investing the walls. From downstairs rose the clangor of the patriarch beating with bedpan on the rail of the rented, rickety hospital bed. His hoarse and Demerol-demented howl pierced ceiling, floor and walls: Leah! Leah! I’m again bleed-ink—!
In and out of ICU, the old man was home again. The boychik baby had arrived two weeks too soon, was named Samuel after one of Myra’s defunct grandfathers and circumcised (despite Henry’s horrified protests) by a gray-bearded rabbi with a stone knife. While the child’s grandmother, Leah the Sore-Eyed, sat for hours on the toilet, bowels immobilized by six thousand years of matzoh balls and sorrow. And Uncle Sid, aided by Henry packing his piece, collected the rents.
Well, he suggested, she could fly out later. He’d pick her up in Grand Junction, Durango, Mexican Hat, whatever the nearest airport.
How can anybody live on your half-time half-a-year job? Simply. Simply going hungry you mean. Nobody raises a family working six months a year. He could, he thought. They could. And the other six months, he reminded her, would be six months of freedom. Freedom to starve? Freedom to live. He refused to be an industrial serf all his life; half his life was bad enough. We’re not going, Henry. I’m going, Myra. Then go, you creep, you worm, you miserable cowardly redneck hillbilly rat, get out of my life. Write to me. Write to you, I’ll write to you, you’ll get letters from my attorney, I’ll write to you.
He looked toward the bassinet. The baby was still crying. He’d kind of miss little Sam. Send pictures, he begged her. I’ll come back to visit now and then.
You ever come back here we’ll put you in jail, she told him. We’ll have a warrant out for your arrest. Uncle Jacob’s the best divorce lawyer in New Jersey. You’ll be on the wanted list in forty-eight states.
It’s nice to be wanted.
Get out.
He left, stumbling down the steps of the front stoop with his patched army duffel bag in one hand and his suncracked winestained cardboard footlocker in the other. Into the dark.
Don’t forget your Buddenbrooks, she called after him. A massive volume from Alfred A. Knopf bounced off his head, dislodging his hat. The door slammed shut. A drizzling rain streamed downward through the urine glow of the streetlamps. He paused to retrieve hat and book and staggered on through the mist. He found the Chevy pickup where he’d left it, halfway down the block with two wheels on the sidewalk and a sodden mass of parking tickets stuffed under the lone windshield wiper. Lightcap the Scofflaw. He loaded his dunnage in the cab, put gear in neutral, found flashlight, unlatched the hood and hotwired the starter. (Myra had flushed the key down the john weeks earlier.) The engine turned over nicely—he did keep it tuned, cleaning the sparkplugs and resetting the points every two thousand miles. Will had taught him that much. He got behind the wheel and headed southwest for the Pulaski Skyway and Route 22. Into the night. Might as well pass through Stump Creek one more time on his way to the deserts of his heart. His mother still loved him. The coondogs liked him. And Brother Will might lend him a couple of twenties.
The divorce decree followed (via Juarez, Mexico) in six weeks, charging extreme mental cruelty, desertion and adultery. Henry brooded and raged and wept for a month, got drunk, signed and returned the papers. Two weeks later her wedding announcement arrived.
13
Motel Room
Onward. Ever onward.
Heater ain’t workin’ too good. The dog is shivering and my knees are cold. Got to get down out of these mountains. Huge fat flakes drift like confetti from the gray world above. They gather on the windshield and my worn-out wipers have trouble pushing them aside. Not too fast, at 30 mph, I ease around the curves; the asphalt is slick with wet snow. We cruise without stopping through the hokey resort of Eagle Nest, around the lake, through Ute Park and on to the old frontier town of Cimarron. Oklahoma lies about 130 miles to the east. My goal for the night. We’ll camp out there in the grasslands somewhere, among the ghosts of the buffalo and the Kiowa, and tell sad stories—me and the dog—about the death of the patriot chiefs.
But the snow never stops. The wind blows harder as we reach the open plains near Cimarron. An April blizzard coming down from the north. Not unusual. Not on the high plains. Nothing between here and the Arctic Circle but barbed wire, grain towers and railroad tracks. The snow and wind and ice are getting serious. Temperature near freezing and my knuckles on the steering wheel are blue. The night is dark, Solstice is hungry and so am I. Time to seek shelter, make camp. Can’t build a fire in this weather though and there aren’t any trees out here anyhow. I hate to do it but I do: entering Cimarron I shop around and find a cheap grungy third-class motel: I can’t afford it but I rent a room for the night. Twelve bucks. No pool, no coffee shop, no restaurant, no dining salon, but the room has a bed—a bed like a sack for sick bears—and a smelly propane heater in one corner. I turn that thing on, bring in the dog, the grub box, the bedroll, the revolver, the toothbrush (for my tooth). The essentials.
I give the dog her Nizoral, her feed and water, then set a can of baked beans on top of the heater. I light up the Primus camp stove, get out skillet, throw in a pound of bacon, the green chilis, the sliced potato. Your basic workingman’s basic grease fix: the bachelor’s supper. I’d seen a cafe two blocks down Main Street but by now the wind is howling so hard and the snow blowing so thick I don’t feel like venturing out there. Might run into the ghost of Morton Bildad in his cotton robe and bare feet, seated on the sidewalk. Chanting a mantra while his ears and nostrils fill with ice.
The wind blusters at the window. Fine grains of dry snow creep in beneath the hollow core door. The plasterboard walls creak and groan. The room is icy-cold from my knees down; I pull on thermal longjohns for comfort, turn on the TV and try the different channels but the only picture I get is snow, snow, an infinity of snow, an electronic blizzard of pale atoms in space. Democritus verified. Travel advisory time, here and now in the eternal infinite.
My dog sleeps, curled on the dirty carpet before the stinking gas heater.
I clean my dishes, light a cigar, ignore the little lurch of pain in my gut and take Gideon’s Bible from the lampstand.
Three thousand miles or thereabout yet to go. A thousand leagues of flat land, the mysterious heart of America, spread between me, in this shabby cell in the Kiowa Motel, and the old green hills of home. Should I even go on? I must. But should I?
As others toss coins and consult the I Ching, so do I open Gideon’s Good Book, at random, several times if necessary, until I find the auguries I want:
And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned him with fire, after they had stoned him with stones…
No, that ain’t it. I try again:
And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God…
Please. Not that. One more time:
Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of mirth is heaviness…
No! That cannot be! One more, one last, one desperate cast of the book, a final flip of the pages:
I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help…
Yes. That’s what I was looking for. The hills of home. I fade into sleep as the storm moans and mumbles beyond the walls….
I wake to a silent morning, brittle with cold. Lifting the stiff cracked window blind, I look out on downtown Cimarron—an empty street frosted with fresh snow. But the sun is shining and my truck, craftily parked to face the east, basks in the initial rays. Perhaps the motor will start without my building a fire under the block.
Sollie the dog scratches at the door, needing to go out. I open the door, she limps out and squats daintily on the doorstep, pissing holes the color of rust in the snow. Good dog. While I do something similar in the bathroom sink. Must be near freezing in this bleak little room: when I turn the tap nothing comes out but a trickle of blood. No, not blood—old water from a rusty pipe. I try the shower, the plumbing strains, groans, I hear a poltergeist banging on a pipe, but no water emerges. No matter. I had a bath only days before, did I not?, down there in van Hoss’s Santa Fe. Seems like a year ago. And why shave anymore? I’ll grow a beard like Will.
I call in the dog, shut the door, light up heater and Primus, cook my breakfast: coffee, fried potatoes, sausage, eggs. On a day like this a man needs grease; I mean grease. Can’t operate the metabolic engines on a frigid morning without a proper lube job. A dog knows that much. Stirring the skillet, I pour off some of the liquid fat onto her Purina chow. She waits a moment for the grease to cool—wise dog—then probes with eager snout into the bowl.
A gentle rapping on my plywood door. Coffee in hand, I turn the knob. The chambermaid stands there, a moonfaced maiden with brown eyes and hair like a raven’s wing, blue-black. Entre usted, chiquita, I’m about to say, but she only giggles, averts her face and hurries on to the next room, trundling her clean-up wagon at her side.
Check-out time already? I glance about for the notice, see only this reflected image in the mirror on the wall of a long haggard man in pee-stained thermal underwear, limp penis dangling from the opening at the crotch. A shocking sight. And this on a peaceful Sunday morning.
I think of Wallace Stevens. Can’t help it. And of our future disembodied life beyond the grave. That beautiful land of pie beyond the sky. Do they wear our colors there? The perfection of the Absolute where all Becoming stops and pure Being, immutable, timeless, unchanging, hangs forever like a ripe peach upon the bough. What else is hanging there, never to rise and throb and ache again?
Breakfast finished, I load our goods back into truck, squirt a jolt of ether into carburetor and fire up the engine. The motor grunts, groans, whinnies like a horse and starts. Good girl. My dog takes her seat, I close the door, we lurch off into the east, into a sea of blazing crystals, bound for Oklahoma.
I glance once at the rearview mirror. The snowy mountains recede in our rear, falling away to the west and south. I am leaving the West and bits of my heart fall behind. Nothing but flat land ahead for a thousand miles. To cheer myself I slip some canned music into the tape deck: Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadours. As they say in Lubbock, there’s only two kinds of music—country and western.
I’ll get along somehow. Have you ever been lonely? When the world has turned you down? I’m walking the floor over you. Driftwood on the river. There’s nothing more to say.
A vulture cruises down the sky, one redneck turkey buzzard seeing me off. Lonesome, lonesome, solitary bird. Good sign or bad omen?
I pass an old railway boxcar resting on blocks in the middle of an empty field. SANTA FE ALL THE WAY. Some rancher’s improvised granary. Here and there we spy an abandoned farmhouse rotting within a clump of dying Chinese elms, surrounded by a burned-out alfalfa field where derelict tractors rust in the rain and bake in the sun. I cross a branch of the Canadian River. Many a trail drive passed this way only a century ago. I think of freckle-faced boys in gigantic floppy hats, the hats their only shade for many a mile, and the big scarves they wore around the neck, not as ornament but as respirator, pulled up over mouth and nose in the choking dust of the herd.
Slipping around, sings Ernie. I’ll always be glad to take you back. There’s a little bit of everything in Texas. Let’s say goodbye like we said hello…
I follow the vulture toward the east. My V-8 chugs along, hitting on six and burning oil; the pressure has sunk to about 30 psi. Not good. But not yet tragic. If we can make it to Kansas City, to Hannibal and the Mississippi, I’ll walk the rest of the way. Only a thousand miles to go from there. If a man can’t walk he might as well be dead. Vachel Lindsay walked across the country. So did John Muir and Johnny Appleseed. A pickup truck is fine, a horse is better, but in the end when you come right down to it the noblest mode of locomotion is that by way of the legs, proceeding upright, erect, like a human being, not squatting on the haunches like a frog.
Brave words, brother. With another little jab in the entrails to remind me of mortality. Which will go farther, last longer, me or the truck? I don’t know but I expect to find out. The odometer creeps toward its second row of zeros, tenth by tenth. Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, I measure mine by the number of Fords, Chevies and Dodges I’ve ridden into the ground over the course of my febrile flustered jocund years. Five decades on Planet Earth. Where to next, O Lonesome Traveler?
Master of self-pity, I let the leaky tears dribble untouched through the whisker of my beard. But not without a glance at my dog: she sits with head up at my side, stares with solemn eyes and stoic resignation straight forward through the windshield, watching the asphalt path unreeling toward us. A tall dog and a brave one. A true and salty dog, my Solstice.
We pass the turnoff to places named Yates and Roy. Good sound cow-country names. I can see the leathery faces, the gnarled hands, the coiled ropes and slickhorn saddles and rolled Stetsons and shit-caked boots. Goddamnit, every man should try the cowboy’s trade at least once in his life. Like it says on the wall of the men’s pissoir in the Dirty Shame Saloon: if you ain’t a cowboy you ain’t shit.
Approaching Clayton now, only twenty-three miles from the Oklahoma border. Volcanic buttes on the skyline to the north rise up like warts, lavender-hued, through the carpeting of golden grass. Irrigated alfalfa fields near the road. An occasional quarter horse leans against the fence, stretching its neck for a jawful of ditchbank weeds. Cottonwoods down in the arroyo, still naked of leaves. Spring has not yet quite arrived out here in the open.
Entering Clayton, N.M., CO2 CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, says the first welcoming billboard. Goodbye to the nineteenth century. Sheltered by stucco walls, the lilac bushes are in bloom—each purple plume encircled by its private corona of flies, bees, bumblebees. I see a young apricot tree adorned with flowers and the elms are leafing out.
And then appears an orange-colored geodesic dome—surely the ugliest excuse for a human dwelling ever imagined—and my heart sinks a little. Only a myopic ge
ometer encapsulated in his own brain could have conceived so repellent a structure. Plywood panels of metallic orange tacked to the skeleton of a space-age bug: bleak poverty of the R. Buckminster mathematic soul.
Past the National Guard Armory: light tanks and big trucks of olive-drab rest in ranks inside a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. Makes me think of Naples, Italy, and the winter of 1945-46. I remember the smell of Cosmoline and the weight of an Army .45 on my hip. While I guarded the gate of the motor pool our C.O. was selling four-by-fours and six-by-sixes through the big hole in the back fence. The Italians may have lost the war—but they robbed us blind in the black market. Viva Italia. Anarchy works: the Italians have proved it for a thousand years.
My Carryall rumbles over the railway tracks deeper into downtown Clayton. There’s the B&H Feed Supply, Purina Chows, City Drug, the Luna Theater showing Texas Chainsaw Massacre, PG, and the Stockman’s Bank, a squat smug block of red brick and dingy plaster that looks like it ain’t been held up for a long time. Where’s Pretty Boy Floyd when we want him? Baby Face Nelson? Jack Dillinger?
North of town I see a pair of small hills: Rabbit Ear Mountain, the early travelers called it, the first topographic feature to meet their eyes as they left Oklahoma headed west toward Santa Fe. Josiah Gregg stopped here for a drink (of water), losing his pistol as he leaned over the horse trough. An unlucky fellow, that Gregg—the Ichabod Klutz of frontier America. Not far east of here he was once pursued by a wildfire for ten miles across the plain. The fire began at his morning camp, making Gregg the only man in American history to be chased by his own campfire.
I do not pause in Clayton. Minutes later we cross the invisible line between New Mexico and Oklahoma and see more Chinese elm, more wooden windmills, more endless shortgrass rangelands. Prairie country—and was there ever so gentle undulant female and sweet a word as prairie. French derived from the medieval Latin prataria, a meadow.