“Are you Mr. Watkins?” I said.
“What’s left of him. The pup’s what’s left of Bill. He’s a Pekingese. Chinese dog. In dog years, he’s even older than I am, and I respect him for that. We’re two old men. What’s your name?”
“Same as the dog’s.”
“I wanted to give him a Chinese name, but old what’s-her-face over there in the camper wouldn’t have it. Claimed she couldn’t pronounce Chinese names. I says, ‘You can’t say Lee?’ She says, ‘You going to name a dog Lee?’ ‘No,’ I says, ‘but what do you think about White Fong?’ Now, she’s not a reader unless it’s a beauty parlor magazine with a Kennedy or Hepburn woman on the cover, so she never understood the name. You’ve read your Jack London, I hope. She says, ‘When I was a girl we had a horse called William, but that name’s too big for that itty-bitty dog. Just call him Bill.’ That was that. She’s a woman of German descent and a decided person. But when old Bill and I are out on our own, I call him White Fong.”
Watkins had worked in a sawmill for thirty years, then retired to Redding; now he spent time in his camper, sometimes in the company of Mrs. Watkins.
“I’d stay on the road, but what’s-her-face won’t have it.”
As we talked, Mrs. What’s-her-face periodically thrust her head from the camper to call instructions to Watkins or White Fong. A finger-wagging woman, full of injunctions for man and beast. Whenever she called, I watched her, Watkins watched me, and the dog watched him. Each time he would say, “Well, boys, there you have it. Straight from the back of the horse.”
“You mind if I swear?” I said I didn’t. “The old biddy’s in there with her Morning Special—sugar doughnut, boysenberry jam, and a shot of Canadian Club in her coffee. In this beauty she sits inside with her letters.”
“Letters?”
“Her hobby’s writing threatening letters to the phone company, the power and light. Whoever. After the kids left home, she took up hollering down rain barrels to occupy herself. You get like that if you don’t watch it. Got to watch how you get. She was complaining today about me spending my sunshine years just driving around and doing nothing constructive. She doesn’t know that’s what old men are supposed to do: stand and look. I told her so. ‘Besides,’ I says, ‘don’t give me that sunshine shit’—excuse me—‘I’m old and it didn’t come easy.’ I says, ‘You call me “old” if you go talking about me, damn you.’ Excuse me. If you ever get the choice of traveling with a German woman or a dog, don’t make a silly mistake.”
We talked about Lassen, and I told him about my dive in Hat Creek.
“When I first started coming over this way years ago,” he said, “you could drink out of it. Maybe you still can, but I’m afraid to try. Might kill me.” He laughed and the gullies in his cheeks changed courses. “I came out of the First War without a scratch. Lost a couple pals to whizzbangs, but I made it out. Just sick one time over there. We were camped in east France and took our water from a stream—real pretty little thing. Then, one after another, we commenced getting sick—deep sick in the guts. Few days later somebody found a dead German upstream. Water had washed away most of his hair and skin. What skin was left was horrible white and peeling off like wallpaper. I haven’t had a sip of stream water since.”
Mrs. Watkins shouted from the camper, “Where’s Bill?” Watkins rattled the leash and White Fong either barked or coughed. “All right,” she said.
“What kind of work you in?” he asked.
That question again. “I’m out of work,” I said to simplify.
“A man’s never out of work if he’s worth a damn. It’s just sometimes he doesn’t get paid. I’ve gone unpaid my share and I’ve pulled my share of pay. But that’s got nothing to do with working. A man’s work is doing what he’s supposed to do, and that’s why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn’t the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man’s work. Let me show you my philosophy of life.” From his pressed Levi’s he took a billfold and handed me a limp business card. “Easy. It’s very old.”
The card advertised a cafe in Merced when telephone numbers were four digits. In quotation marks was a motto: “Good Home Cooked Meals.”
“‘Good Home Cooked Meals’ is your philosophy?”
“Turn it over, peckerwood.”
Imprinted on the back in tiny, fading letters was this:
I’ve been bawled out, balled up, held up, held down, hung up, bulldozed, blackjacked, walked on, cheated, squeezed and mooched; stuck for war tax, excess profits tax, sales tax, dog tax, and syntax, Liberty Bonds, baby bonds, and the bonds of matrimony, Red Cross, Blue Cross, and the double cross; I’ve worked like hell, worked others like hell, have got drunk and got others drunk, lost all I had, and now because I won’t spend or lend what little I earn, beg, borrow or steal, I’ve been cussed, discussed, boycotted, talked to, talked about, lied to, lied about, worked over, pushed under, robbed, and damned near ruined. The only reason I’m sticking around now is to see
WHAT THE HELL IS NEXT.
“I like it,” I said.
“Any man’s true work is to get his boots on each morning. Curiosity gets it done about as well as anything else.”
He wanted to look my rig over, which he did critically. “Not much here,” he said. “Now, my camper has most anything you’d want. Because of her. Even one of those Ping-Pong TV games. She says we have to have it to entertain the great-grandkids. I says to her, ‘Why can’t they look out the window?’ “
I laughed.
“You think I’m joking. Those kids won’t have anything unless wires come out of it. If I ran an extension cord down my pantleg and let them plug me in, then they’d believe they had a real great-granddad.”
Mrs. What’s-her-face whistled the call of the bobwhite out the door. “Well, boys, there you have it. That means come drink your Sanka and take your pill. Sanka! If I don’t watch it, it’s all going to come down to that.”
Six
West by Northwest
1
LASSEN Peak is a kind of bookend to the bottom of the Cascade Range that runs single-file toward the Canadian border, where Mount Baker props up the other end. In between—preeminently—are Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, Hood, and Shasta. Their symmetric conical peaks average nearly twelve thousand feet and retain snowy summits all year; what’s more, they are part of the most volcanically active range in the conterminous states.
Highway 89 wound among the volcanic dumpings from Lassen that blasted Hat Creek valley about three hundred times between 1914 and 1917. Scrub covered the ash, cinders, and lava as the wasteland renewed itself; yet even still it looked terribly crippled. Off the valley floor, California 299 climbed to ride the rim of the Pit River gorge. I ate a sandwich at the edge of a deep rift that opened like jaws to expose rocks so far below they were several hundred million years older than the ones I sat on. From the high edge I looked down on the glossy backs of swallows as they glided a thousand feet, closed their wings like folded fans, and plummeted into the abyss. It was a wild, mad, silent, spectacular descent of green iridescence that left me woozy.
Again on the road, I drove up a lumpy, dry plateau, all the while thinking of the errors that had led me to Hat Creek. The word error comes from a Middle English word, erren, which means “to wander about,” as in the knight errant. The word evolved to mean “going astray” and that evolved to mean “mistake.” As for mistake, it derives from Old Norse and once meant “to take wrongly.” Yesterday, I had been mistaken and in error, taking one wrong road after another. As a result, I had come to a place of clear beauty and met a man who carried his philosophy on a cafe business card.
The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering an
d wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.
The Boss of the Plains had said (after he mentioned his death wish) that his life had come to seem more and more of the same thing, and he called the story of his life Ten Thousand Mistakes. It stood to reason. To him a mistake was deviation from preconceived ideas, from standard answers, from wandering off the marked route. To him, change meant error.
Biochemists hold that evolution proceeds by random genetic changes—errors—and that each living thing is an experiment within the continuum of trial and error and temporary success. In nature, correct means harmony that breeds survival. Always to demand established routes, habitual ways, then, is to go against the grain of life; that is often the Indian impulse. But to engage in the continuing experiment is to reach for harmony. Hesse writes:
I am an experiment on the part of nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task is to allow this game on the part of the primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine.
Whitman said it too: “A man is a summons and a challenge.”
I had driven through Fall River Mills and McArthur, and I couldn’t remember a thing about them. If I were going off on some blue highway of the mind, I should have pulled over. North of Bieber, on a whim, I followed the road to Lookout. In the high valley lay marshes filled with yellow-headed blackbirds, pintails, cinnamon teals, willets, Canada geese. The highway rose again into another volcanic region. Mount Shasta, sixty miles west, isolated by its hugeness, haloed in clouds, looked like a Hokusai woodcut of Mount Fuji. Perhaps it is the immensity of space around Shasta or the abundance of high peaks in the West that diminishes a mountain of such size and perfection in the American imagination, but in almost any other country, a volcano so big and well-made as Shasta would be a national object of reverence—as in fact it once was to the first men who lived under it.
I never found Lookout. In dry and dusty Tulelake, I bought groceries, then crossed into Oregon, where the Cascades to the west blocked a froth of storm clouds; but for the mountains, I would have been in rain again. A town of only fifteen thousand somehow spread across the entire bottom of a long valley; when I saw the reach of Klamath Falls, I kept going. U.S. 97 was an ordeal of cars and heavy trucks. I don’t know whether Oregonians generally honk horns or whether they had it in for me, but surely they honked. Later, someone said it was part of the “Keep Moving, Stranger” campaign. I turned off into the valley at the first opportunity, an opportunity numbered route 62 that ran to Fort Klamath, a town that began in 1863 as an Army post with the mission of controlling hostile Klamath Indians, who had succeeded for years in keeping settlers out of their rich valley. Keep moving, stranger.
Drawn as always to the glow of neon in the dusk, I stopped at a wooden cafe. No calendars, otherwise perfect. In front sat an Argosy landcruiser (the kind you see in motel parking lots) with an Airstream trailer attached; on top of the Argosy was a motorboat and on the front and back matched mopeds. Often I’d seen the American propensity to take to the highway with as many possessions as a vehicle could carry—that inclination to get away from it all while hauling it all along—but I stood amazed at this achievement of transport called a vacation. Although the Argosy side windows were one-way glass (to look and not get looked at back), in the trailer I saw pine paneling, Swiss cupboards, and a self-cleaning oven. What the owner really wanted was to drive his 3-BR-split-foyer so he wouldn’t have to leave the garage and basement behind.
A man with a napkin tucked to his belt came out of the cafe. A plump woman, lately beyond the Midol years, face fearful like the lady who has just discovered the heartbreak of psoriasis, watched from the cafe.
“What’s up, chum?” the man said.
“I couldn’t believe this outfit. You are one well-prepared family. This little highway’s not really big enough for you, is it?”
He relaxed at what he took as sympathy. “Tried a damned back road.”
We went inside, and I heard the woman whisper, “His type make me nervous.” She’d read about people like me and stared in a bold, contemptuous way she never would have used had she been alone. I tried to check my own irritation. She probably wasn’t a bad sort; she had her good side. Surely she had studied the Gospel According to Heloise and knew by rote the six helpful hints for removing catsup stains.
The food was ordinary, prices high, the waitress unpleasant, and, on top of that, I got reviled by people who could afford life at six-miles-per-gallon. I paid and left. The couple came out, hoisted themselves into the Argosy, and clicked locks against my type. Just above the legal maximum, off they went, those people who took no chances on anything—including their ideas—getting away from them. After all, they read the papers, they watched TV, and they knew America was a dangerous place.
2
MOUNT Mazama may be the greatest nonexistent fourteen-thousand-foot volcano in the country. Actually, it isn’t entirely nonexistent: only the top half is. From the upper end of the Klamath basin, you can still see a massive, symmetrically sloping uplift of the mountain base. Some six thousand years ago, geologists conjecture, the top of Mazama blew off in a series of ruinous eruptions and the sides collapsed into the interior.
Hoping for a place to pass the night, I took a highway up the slope. After a few miles, the road became a groove cut between ten-foot snowbanks, but stars shone, so I drove on to the top. I got out and looked around. A brilliant night. Trusting more than seeing, I walked through a tunnel in a snowdrift to the craterous rim of Mazama. There, far below in the moonlight and edged with ice, lay a two-thousand-foot-deep lake. Klamath braves used to test their courage by climbing down the treacherous scree inside the caldera; if they survived, they bathed in the cold water of the volcano and renewed themselves. Also to this nearly perfect circle of water came medicine men looking for secrets of the Grandfathers. Once a holy place, now Crater Lake is only a famous Oregon tourist attraction.
The next morning, the fog rising from the surface of the lake (the deepest and bluest in America) gave it the look of a hot washtub of Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing. The lodge still lay piled under some of the six hundred inches of annual snowfall here, and the road down the other side of Mazama was not yet cleared, so I went back the way I’d come. Again. Oregon 230 followed a broad mountain stream called Muir Creek. When the morning warmed, I stopped along the banks to fill a basin and wash; after Hat Creek, the water was merely bracing.
Big, yellow-hooded blossoms of the Western skunk cabbage spread over the margins. Although the plant bears some resemblance in shape to the purplish skunk cabbage of the East, it is a relative of the jack-in-the-pulpit, and its flowers are virtually odorless. Looking nothing like cabbage, the leaves were used by Indians to wrap food for cooking; they pulverized the hot, peppery roots into a flour that helped save them (and the Lewis and Clark expedition) from starvation in early spring before other edible plants sprouted. Even today elk and bear, grubbing for the roots, will dig up whole patches of swamp.
I crossed the Cascades on Oregon 58. While the mountains were not particularly high, the road made steep climbs and drops over timbered slopes, and runaway-truck escape ramps looked like ski jumps. On the western side, humidity increased and ferns grew thick as jungle vines. For a time, desert lay behind.
At noon, the journey began a kind of sea change that started when I drove up an old logging road into the recesses of Salt Creek, a stream working hard to beat itself to a lather. In Missouri, when a man’s whereabouts come into question, the people say he’s “gone up Salt Creek.” It’s a place in which you disappear. Maybe I should have taken warning.
After a sandwich, I poked about the woods and turned up a piece of crawling yellow jelly nearly the length of my hand. It was a banana slug, so named because the mollusk looks like a wet, squirming banana. I wanted to photograph it, but a drizzle came on, so I bedded it down in damp leaf lit
ter in a pail. I could drive out of the rain to take its picture.
Then, three things, quite unconnected, began to stack themselves like crystals into a pattern.
FIRST: Waiting on the rain, I studied the map. Where to go? South lay two towns of fine name—Lookingglass and Riddle—but I would have to backtrack sixty wet miles, and already the desert showers had left me prey to the “Oregon blues,” that dissipation of spirit that accompanies the rainy periods when suicides noticeably increase. But Lookingglass! What a name!
SECOND: The town recalled to me a line from Walter de la Mare: “Things are the mind’s mute looking-glass.”
THIRD: Still waiting on the weather, I started reading a book I’d bought in Phoenix, The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk’s account of the ancient rites of the Oglala Sioux. In contrast to the good and straight red road of life, Black Elk says, the blue road is the route of “one who is distracted, who is ruled by his senses, and who lives for himself rather than for his people.” I was stunned. Was it racial memory that had urged me to drive seven thousand miles of blue highway, a term I thought I had coined?
That’s when something opened like a windowshade unexpectedly rattling up in a dark room. A sudden, new cast of light. What need for a man to make a trip to Lookingglass, Oregon, when he’d been seeing his own image across the length of the country? De la Mare was right: a mirror may not reflect mind, but a man’s response to landscapes, faces, events does. My skewed vision was that of a man looking at himself by looking at what he looks at. A man watching himself: that was the simulacrum on the window in the Nevada desert.
Hadn’t I even made a traveling companion of the great poet of ego, the one who sings of himself, who promises to “effuse egotism and show it underlying all,” who finds the earth his own likeness? Whitman:
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 26