I was in one of the strangest pieces of topography I’d ever seen, a place, until now, completely beyond my imaginings. What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it’s like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.
13
SUNDOWN, taking color from the land, briefly spread it low over the western sky; then it was gone from there too. As the air cooled, I built a small fire and cooked some eggs and sausage, made coffee, and laced it with bourbon. Across the stream, a javelina sniffed and watched. The woods were full of small noises fusing with the purl of Cave Creek, and the fire loosed a thin column of blue, resinous smoke to curl around me before rising to the black sky; every so often an orange coal went cracking out into the stream, which extinguished it with a hiss.
Still looking for a pattern, a core, in what had been happening, I played a tape recording of the last few days and made notes. After a while I gave up on words and tried diagrams in hopes an image might shake free an idea. I cogitated, ergoed, and sumed, and got nothing.
A sudden movement in the darkness. A voice: “Writing a book?” I jumped and spilled coffee. I couldn’t see anything beyond the pale of the fire. “Sorry to scare you. Figured an old chief like you would hear me coming.”
A man, about forty, stepped into the light. He had a soft, kindly face, but it was terribly drawn, and he was bent slightly in the shoulders as if yoked to something. He wore flame-stitch bullhide boots and a Boss-of-the-Plains Stetson with an absurd seven-inch crown. He saw my notebook. “You into radio schematics?”
“That radio is my life.”
“Hunting answers?”
“Ideas.”
“I could write a book about my life,” he said. “I’d call it Ten Thousand Mistakes. I’ve made them all: wife, kids, job, education. I can’t even remember the first six thousand.”
“Done a pretty good job myself.” I was glad for the company, although I had thought I wanted to be alone. “How about a little coffee and bourbon?” His face moved around as if trying to come out of a fixed position of agony, but something was lacking, something of moment. Rather, he had the look of a man pulling on wet swimming trunks.
“I shouldn’t be drinking. Got out of the hospital this week. Went in for those ‘routine tests’ people die from. Doctors thought I had a cancerous colon. Then they tried ulcerative colitis. Finally settled on a rectal polyp.”
One minute after meeting me, he’d admitted to ten thousand failures and given a tour of his lower tract. I wondered where we’d be in half an hour.
“Sit down if you like.”
“Are you just moving through?”
I gave a précis to distract any further proctological talk. When I finished, he said, “Your little spree sounds nice until you go back.”
“Don’t have to go back who I was.”
“Can you get out of it?”
“I’ll find out. Maybe experience is like a globe—you can’t go the wrong way if you travel far enough.”
“You’ll end up where you started.”
“I’m working on who. Where can take care of himself. A ‘little spree’ can give people a chance to accept changes in a man.” I was sounding like some bioenergized group leader. I poured another coffee and bourbon. “Sure you won’t have a sip of Old Mr. Easy Life?”
“Could you put some milk in it?” We introduced ourselves. He was from Tucson and worked in the loan department of a bank. “What you were talking about sounds like marital problems,” he said.
“I guess, but my point was that what you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do—especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” I was doing it again.
He looked behind himself into the dark. “You have kids?” I said I didn’t, and he nodded as if that explained something. “I have two girls, twenty and eighteen. When I was buried I forgot—”
“When you were buried?”
“Married. When I was married I forgot my family. Now I’m divorced, and I can’t forget them. Wish I could. They’ve hurt me. I wish I’d bronzed the girls instead of their baby shoes.”
“More corn mash in your milk?” We sipped in the darkness and talked of little things. He’d rented a trailer that afternoon and driven to the Chiricahuas to put the hospital out of mind. His hobby was the Old West, and he regretted not becoming a history professor—his true calling.
“I like to come here to read history. Reading Plutarch this trip. Been driving up for years. Always alone. My wife and daughters wouldn’t ever join me. Their lives go as far as they can stretch their hair dryer cords.”
To steer him away from marriage, I asked about his work. He disliked it and had looked into other things but found employers distrustful of anyone changing jobs outside his field.
“Once you’re thirty, you’re permitted to go up in your specialty or maybe sideways if you can make it look like up. But if you want out altogether, that’s the same as going down. And after forty they think the bottom layers of your life have turned to coal.”
The job problems had strained the marriage. He and his wife simply grew tired of sharing each other’s struggles and losses, and when one had a success, the other became envious. And each feared aging—especially the other’s. Things finally broke when his elder daughter took a job modeling for an advertising agency and her face and bare shoulders began appearing on condom machines around the city.
“You know: ‘Ribbed Sensation! New Pleasure Delight!’ The picture didn’t really show anything. Actually, it looked like she was yawning instead of the other, but the condom—I mean the context—made it look like the other. My girls thought it was funny and went around telling people to go down to the Texaco and take a look. My wife and I argued over how to handle it. After that, we just fell apart as a family.”
I didn’t say anything. Questions led him back to the same topic, and I had nothing to say about marriage. He was starting to ruin Cave Creek. I poured another shot. Maybe he’d forget. “When you’re driving,” he said, “do you ever feel like swinging over in front of a semi that’s really moving?”
“I know the urge.”
He pulled off his Boss of the Plains and brushed it fastidiously with a sleeve. “I’d like to do what you’re doing, but I don’t have the guts for it right now—literally.” He put the Stetson on, setting it at just the right pitch. “Lately, I’ve even wished I’d go broke so I could go for broke. I wish I’d get truly desperate.” His words were coming as if strangling him.
Here’s a man, I thought, who would change his life if he could do it by changing his hat. Maybe a .22 long rifle in a shirt pocket would help.
“The other day,” he said, “I remembered something from when I was a little kid that I didn’t understand then. I was six or seven. My dad was stuffing me into a snowsuit like parents do—this arm, that arm. When he had me in, he looked at me so long it scared me. Whatever he saw made him shudder.” The boss cleared his throat. “Now I know what it meant.”
“What did it mean?”
“He knew what I was going to know.”
“Love can make fathers shudder.”
We had another round. That might have been a mistake. The conversation started slipping as he began wallowing in crises. He said things like, “The whole bag just seems more and more of the same,” and, “Other people make life so damned banal.”
I suspected that the Boss embraced one crisis after another because they gave him significance, something like tragic stature. He had so lost belief in a world outside himself that, without crisis, he had nothing worth talking about. On and on, the tolling of words revealed his expertise in living a l
ife that baffled him.
Occasionally, when the fire ignited a drop of resin, our twin shadows, absurdly big, would stretch to the edge of night, then shrink back with the dying flame. He noticed my attention wandering and asked a question that flabbergasted me: “So you say you’re just driving through?” He wasn’t that drunk. Maybe he wasn’t drunk at all; maybe he just never quit thinking of himself long enough to listen. He made me tired.
“That’s right,” I said. “Just driving through to Utica.”
I wanted to slap him around, wake him up. He had the capacity to see but not the guts; he mucked in the drivel of his life, afraid to go into the subterranean currents that dragged him about. A man concealed in his own life, scared to move, holding himself too close, petting himself too much.
“Time for some sleep,” I said and yawned big to prove it.
He got to his feet, leaning a little this way and that. Then he delivered a lecture. I think he’d read too much Plutarch. After a sentence or two, I flipped on the tape recorder. Here is the essence:
“In eighteen eighty-five, the government of these United States took measures to prevent Apaches from manufacturing tiswin. Tiswin is a beer-like intoxicant Apaches had made for centuries. The great Chiricahua Apache, Goyathlay—whose name translates as One-Who-Yawns—became angered at this additional infringement on Indian traditions and conducted several retaliatory raids here and in Mexico against the ancient enemy. One notes the government had appropriated most of the hunting grounds of the Chiricahua, forcing them to depend on the Army for sustenance, although the Army seldom gave Apaches their full allotment and often made them—even children, the aged, and infirm—walk twenty miles to get rations. Further, unscrupulous white men, who wanted Apache land for mines and ranches, incited the Chiricahua by telling them they were marked for extermination. They knew the subsequent unrest would give the Army an excuse to drive them off the reservation. Intelligent commanders like General George Crook saw this, but Washington rarely listened because the Congress knew all it needed to know about blood-thirsty Apaches. President Grover Cleveland based his judgment on headlines and yellow journalism and wanted Goyathlay hanged. General Crook understood that Goyathlay fought not out of hatred but out of fear and love for his heritage and—what’s more—having nothing of significance to do any longer. This is all a footnote.
“After numerous raids and subsequent surrenders, Goyathlay’s final surrender brought him incarceration in damp Florida, where so many desert Indians died. The chief saw the old wars were a losing game. A willingness to die no longer made a man free—it made him stupid. By fighting so hard for their old life, the Chiricahua forced the extinction of their ancient ways. There’s the key. But the reactionary Goyathlay accepted some of the new ways after he was moved to a reservation in Oklahoma, where he became a successful farmer, wrote his autobiography, and joined the Dutch Reformed Church—the church which prays, ‘All my works are as dirty rags in the sight of the Lord.’
“But I’ve gotten ahead of my story. After Goyathlay’s many raids in this desert, he often escaped to these mountains—to this very canyon, a sacred place where Apaches heard voices of the dead. He camped by and drank from this very stream. Like the outlaws of Tombstone who also hid here, Goyathlay was a desperado—that is to say, a desperate man.”
He stopped speaking. “Aren’t we all?” I said and yawned again.
“The desperado who died aged and successful although deprived of his old life and homeland, One-Who-Yawns by name, you may have heard of.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Think again, my countryman. The United States Army called him Geronimo. You see, there is hope for us all.”
14
THE morning was the kind of day that makes a man doubt the reality of death: warm sun, cool air, clear water, bird notes flying out of the hardwoods like sparks from an anvil. I washed and got moving, heading up canyon. After four miles, the pavement stopped and the road turned to a horrendously stony slope that twisted sharply up into the mountain forest. A sign: IMPASSABLE TO TRAILERS. An intriguing road. Whitman writes:
O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?
Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost?
Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me?
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you.
Ready for anything that morning, that’s what I got.
Onion Saddle Road, after I was committed to it, narrowed to a single rutted lane affording no place to turn around; if I met somebody, one of us would have to back down. The higher I went, the more that idea unnerved me—the road was bad enough driving forward. The compass swung from point to point, and within any five minutes it had touched each of the three hundred sixty degrees. The clutch started pushing back, and ruts and craters and rocks threw the steering wheel into nasty jerks that wrenched to the spine. I understood why, the day before, I’d thought there could be no road over the Chiricahuas: there wasn’t. No wonder desperadoes hid in this inaccessibility.
Higher and higher the road, hanging precariously to the mountain edge as if tacked on; the truck swung around the sharp turns, and all I could see was sky and cloud. It was like flying. Then, far above the southern Arizona desert, snow lay in shaded depressions. Finally, at eight thousand feet, I came to what must have been the summit. Pines were bigger on the western slope, but the descent was no less rocky or steep. And it went on and on. I thought: Why couldn’t this curse of a road just be a nightmare? Why couldn’t I wake to find myself groggy and warm, curled like a snail in my sleeping bag?
No road signs, no indications that I was coming off the mountain; maybe I was on the way to a dead end. I could only trust in the blue-highway maxim: “I can’t take any more” comes just before “I don’t give a damn.” Let the caring snap, let it break all to hell. Caring breaks before the man if he can only wait it out.
Sure enough, the single lane became two, the dirt macadam, and Pinery Canyon led out to Arizona 186, a crooked highway that dipped into arroyos rather than bridging them; but it was smooth beyond measure, and Ghost Dancing drove itself. I had crossed. No accomplishment at all, but it seemed like one. In the side mirror the powdery visage of a man embraced by the desert; I was wearing a layer of the Chiricahuas. As for Paradise, I never found it.
The towns were Dos Cabezas, a clutch of houses under worn twin peaks like skulls, and Willcox, clean and orderly. Then another road choice: two days of rock and ruts through the Little Dragoon Mountains or I-10. It was Friday, and I wanted company. I weakened and took the well-beaten and undenied public road northwest toward Phoenix, where I hoped to find a man who knew my boyhood almost as well as I did.
The interstate, after the mountains, came as relief. I sat back. My encounter of the night before had been on my mind since morning. The Boss of the Plains bothered me—I didn’t know why. Things outside himself he found banal and not worth his attention. Was that it? An empty man full of himself? Unlike other people of common coin I’d met along the road, he was separate rather than distinct; yet, unlike his, their commonality sang. They seemed parts of a whole. After traveling nineteenth-century America, de Tocqueville came to believe one result of democracy was a concentration of each man’s attention upon himself.
The highway rose slowly for miles then dropped into wacky Texas Canyon, an abrupt and peculiar piling of boulders, which looked as if hoisted into strange angles and points of balance. Nature in a zany mood had stacked up the rounded rocks in whimsical and impossible ways, trying out new principles of design, experimenting with old laws of gravity, putting theorems of the physicists to the test. But beyond Texas Canyon, the terrain was once more logical and mundane right angles, everything flat or straight up.
I was thinking of Cave Creek again. The beautiful place seemed shadowy as if the Boss cast a murk. Black Elk says men get lost in the darkness of their own eyes, and indeed, the Boss had found a thousand ways
to protect himself from a real confrontation with himself. And more: he listened for despair, then accorded himself with it. “Hell under the skull bones,” Whitman calls it.
In Tucson, I stopped for gas along a multilane called Miracle Mile (they love that appellation in the West) congested like an asthmatic bronchial tube; then back to the highway. By last light, I came into the city named after the bird forever reborn from the ashes of what it has been.
Five
West by Southwest
1
I DON’T suppose that saguaros mean to give comic relief to the otherwise solemn face of the desert, but they do. Standing on the friable slopes they are quite persnickety about, saguaros mimic men as they salute, bow, dance, raise arms to wave, and grin with faces carved in by woodpeckers. Older plants, having survived odds against their reaching maturity of sixty million to one, have every right to smile.
The saguaro is ninety percent water, and a big, two-hundred-year-old cactus may hold a ton of it—a two-year supply. With this weight, a plant that begins to lean is soon on the ground; one theory now says that the arms, which begin sprouting only after forty or fifty years when the cactus has some height, are counterweights to keep the plant erect.
The Monday I drove northeast out of Phoenix, saguaros were in bloom—comparatively small, greenish-white blossoms perched on top of the trunks like undersized Easter bonnets; at night, long-nosed bats came to pollinate them. But by day, cactus wrens, birds of daring aerial skill, put on the show as they made kamikaze dives between toothpick-size thorns into nest cavities, where they were safe from everything except the incredible ascents over the spines by black racers in search of eggs the snakes would swallow whole.
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 20