Travels with Charley in Search of America (18 page)

It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane. No amount of natural wonders, of rigid cliffs and belching waters, of smoking springs could even engage my attention while that pandemonium went on. After about the fifth encounter I gave up, turned Rocinante about, and retraced my way. If I had stopped the night and bears had gathered to my cooking, I dare not think what would have happened.

At the gate the park guard checked me out. “You didn’t stay long. Where’s the dog?”

“Locked up back there. And I owe you an apology. That dog has the heart and soul of a bear-killer and I didn’t know it. Heretofore he has been a little tender-hearted toward an underdone steak.”

“Yeah!” he said. “That happens sometimes. That’s why I warned you. A bear dog would know his chances, but I’ve seen a Pomeranian go up like a puff of smoke. You know, a well-favored bear can bat a dog like a tennis ball.”

I moved fast, back the way I had come, and I was reluctant to camp for fear there might be some unofficial non-government bears about. That night I spent in a pretty auto court near Livingston. I had my dinner in a restaurant, and when I had settled in with a drink and a comfortable chair and my bathed bare feet on a carpet with red roses, I inspected Charley. He was dazed. His eyes held a faraway look and he was totally exhausted, emotionally no doubt. Mostly he reminded me of a man coming out of a long, hard drunk—worn out, depleted, collapsed. He couldn’t eat his dinner, he refused the evening walk, and once we were in he collapsed on the floor and went to sleep. In the night I heard him whining and yapping, and when I turned on the light his feet were making running gestures and his body jerked and his eyes were wide open, but it was only a night bear. I awakened him and gave him some water. This time he went to sleep and didn’t stir all night. In the morning he was still tired. I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple.

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words “The Great Divide” and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China. The Rocky Mountains are too big, too long, too important to have to be imposing. In Montana to which I had returned, the rise is gradual, and were it not for a painted sign I never would have known when I crossed it. It wasn’t very high as elevations go. I passed it as I saw the sign, but I stopped and backed up and got out and straddled it. As I stood over it facing south it had a strange impact on me that rain falling on my right foot must fall into the Pacific Ocean, while that on my left foot would eventually find its way after uncountable miles to the Atlantic. The place wasn’t impressive enough to carry a stupendous fact like that.

It is impossible to be in this high spinal country without giving thought to the first men who crossed it, the French explorers, the Lewis and Clark men. We fly it in five hours, drive it in a week, dawdle it as I was doing in a month or six weeks. But Lewis and Clark and their party started in St. Louis in 1804 and returned in 1806. And if we get to thinking we are men, we might remember that in the two and a half years of pushing through wild and unknown country to the Pacific Ocean and then back, only one man died and only one deserted. And we get sick if the milk delivery is late and nearly die of heart failure if there is an elevator strike. What must these men have thought as a really new world unrolled—or was the progress so slow that the impact was lost? I can’t believe they were unimpressed. Certainly their report to the government is an excited and an exciting document. They were not confused. They knew what they had found.

I drove across the upraised thumb of Idaho and through real mountains that climbed straight up, tufted with pines and deep-dusted with snow. My radio went dead and I thought it was broken, but it was only that the high ridges cut off the radio waves. The snow started to fall, but my luck held, for it was only a light gay snow. The air was softer than it had been on the other side of the Great Divide and I seemed to remember reading that the warm airs from over the Japanese current penetrate deep inland. The underbrush was thick and very green, and everywhere was a rush of waters. The roads were deserted except for an occasional hunting party in red hats and yellow jackets, and sometimes with a deer or an elk draped over the hood of the car. A few mountain cabins were incised into the steep slopes, but not many.

I was having to make many stops for Charley’s sake. Charley was having increasing difficulty in evacuating his bladder, which is Nellie talk for the sad symptoms of not being able to pee. This sometimes caused him pain and always caused him embarrassment. Consider this dog of great
élan,
of impeccable manner, of
ton, enfin
of a certain majesty. Not only did he hurt, but his feelings were hurt. I would stop beside the road and let him wander, and turn my back on him in kindness. It took him a very long time. If it had happened to a human male I would have thought it was prostatitis. Charley is an elderly gentleman of the French persuasion. The only two ailments the French will admit to are that and a bad liver.

And so, while waiting for him and pretending to inspect plants and small water courses, I tried to reconstruct my trip as a single piece and not as a series of incidents. What was I doing wrong? Was it going as I wished? Before I left, I was briefed, instructed, directed, and brain-washed by many of my friends. One among them is a well-known and highly respected political reporter. He had been grassrooting with the presidential candidates, and when I saw him he was not happy, because he loves his country, and he felt a sickness in it. I might say further that he is a completely honest man.

He said bitterly, “If anywhere in your travels you come on a man with guts, mark the place. I want to go to see him. I haven’t seen anything but cowardice and expediency. This used to be a nation of giants. Where have they gone? You can’t defend a nation with a board of directors. That takes men. Where are they?”

“Must be somewhere,” I said.

“Well, you try to root a few out. We need them. I swear to God the only people in this country with any guts seem to be Negroes. Mind you,” he said, “I don’t want to keep Negroes out of the hero business, but I’m damned if I want them to corner the market. You dig me up ten white, able-bodied Americans who aren’t afraid to have a conviction, an idea, or an opinion in an unpopular field, and I’ll have the major part of a standing army.”

His obvious worry in this matter impressed me, so I did listen and look along the way. And it is true I didn’t hear many convictions. I saw only two real-man fights, with bare fists and enthusiastic inaccuracy, and both of those were over women.

Charley came back apologizing for needing more time. I wished I could help him but he wanted to be alone. And I remembered another thing my friend said.

“There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln. Come to think of it, I’ve known a few, but not many. Wouldn’t it be silly if the Constitution had been talking about a young man whose life centers around a whistle, a wink, and Wildroot?”

I remember retorting, “Maybe the People are always those who used to live the generation before last.”

Charley was pretty stiff. I had to help him into the cab of Rocinante. And we proceeded up the mountain. A very light dry snow blew like white dust on the highway, and the evening was coming earlier now, I thought. Just under the ridge of a pass I stopped for gasoline in a little put-together, do-it-yourself group of cabins, square boxes, each with a stoop, a door, and one window, and no vestige of a garden or gravel paths. The small combined store, repair shop, and lunch room behind the gas pumps was as unprepossessing as any I have ever seen. The blue restaurant signs were old and autographed by the flies of many past summers. “Pies like mother would of made if mother could of cooked.” “We don’t look in your mouth. Don’t look in our kitchen.” “No checks cashed unless accompanied by fingerprints.” The standard old ones. There would be no cellophane on the food here.

No one came to the gas pump, so I went into the lunch room. A sound of a quarrel came from the back room, which was probably the kitchen—a deep voice and a lighter male voice yammering back and forth. I called, “Anybody home?” and the voices stopped. Then a burly man came through the door, still scowling from the fracas.

“Want something?”

“Fill-up of gas. But if you have a cabin, I might stay the night.”

“Take your pick. Ain’t a soul here.”

“Can I have a bath?”

“I’ll bring you a bucket of hot water. Winter rates two dollars.”

“Good. Can I get something to eat?”

“Baked ham and beans, ice cream.”

“Okay. I’ve got a dog.”

“It’s a free country. The cabins are all open. Take your pick. Sing out if you need something.”

No effort had been spared to make the cabins uncomfortable and ugly. The bed was lumpy, the walls dirty yellow, the curtains like the underskirts of a slattern. And the close room had a mixed aroma of mice and moisture, mold and the smell of old, old dust, but the sheets were clean and a little airing got rid of the memories of old inhabitants. A naked globe hung from the ceiling and the room was heated by kerosene stove.

There was a knock on the door, and I admitted a young man of about twenty, dressed in gray flannel slacks, two-tone shoes, a polka-dotted ascot, and a blazer with the badge of a Spokane high school. His dark, shining hair was a masterpiece of overcombing, the top hair laid back and criss-crossed with long side strands that just cleared the ears. He was a shock to me after the ogre of the lunch counter.

“Here’s your hot water,” he said, and his was the voice of the other quarreler. The door was open, and I saw his eyes go over Rocinante and linger on the license plate.

“You really from New York?”

“Yep.”

“I want to go there sometime.”

“Everybody there wants to come out here.”

“What for? There’s nothing here. You can just rot here.”

“If it’s rotting you want, you can do it any place.”

“I mean there’s no chance for advancing yourself.”

“What do you want to advance toward?”

“Well, you know, there’s no theater and no music, no one to—talk to. Why it’s even hard to get late magazines unless you subscribe.”

“So you read
The New Yorker
?”

“How did you know? I subscribe.”

“And
Time
magazine?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You’ve got the world at your fingertips, the world of fashion, of art, and the world of thought right in your own back yard. Going would only confuse you further.”

“One likes to see for one’s self,” he said. I swear he said it.

“That your father?”

“Yes, but I’m more like an orphan. All he likes is fishing and hunting and drinking.”

“And what do you like?”

“I want to get ahead in the world. I’m twenty years old. I’ve got to think of my future. There he is yelling for me. He can’t say anything without yelling. You going to eat with us?”

“Sure.”

I bathed slowly in the crusted galvanized bucket. For a moment I thought of digging out New York clothes and putting on a puff for the boy, but I dropped that one and settled for clean chino slacks and a knitted shirt.

The burly proprietor’s face was red as a ripe raspberry when I went into the lunch counter. He thrust his jaw at me. “As if I ain’t carrying enough trouble, you got to be from New York.”

“Is that bad?”

“For me it is. I just got that kid quieted down and you put burrs under his blanket.”

“I didn’t give New York a good name.”

“No, but you come from there and now he’s all riled up again. Oh, hell, what’s the use? He’s no damn good around here. Come on, you might as well eat with us out back.”

Out back was kitchen, larder, pantry, dining room—and the cot covered with army blankets made it bedroom too. A great gothic wood stove clicked and purred. We were to eat at a square table covered with white, knife-scarred oilcloth. The keyed-up boy dished up bowls of bubbling navy beans and fat-back.

“I wonder if you could rig me a reading light?”

“Hell, I turn off the generator when we go to bed. I can give you a coal-oil lamp. Pull up. Got a canned baked ham in the oven.”

The moody boy served the beans listlessly.

The red-faced man spoke up. “I thought he’d just finish high school and that would be the end of it, but not him, not Robbie. He took a night course—now get this—not in high school. He paid for it. Don’t know where he got the money.”

“Sounds pretty ambitious.”

“Ambitious my big fat foot. You don’t know what the course was—hairdressing. Not barbering— hairdressing—for women. Now maybe you see why I got worries.”

Robbie turned from carving the ham. The slender knife was held rigidly in his right hand. He searched my face for the look of contempt he expected.

I strove to look stern, thoughtful, and noncommittal all at once. I pulled at my beard, which is said to indicate concentration. “Whatever I say, one or the other of you is going to sic the dog on me. You’ve got me in the middle.”

Papa took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “By God, you’re right,” he said, and then he chuckled and the tension went out of the room.

Robbie brought the plates of ham to the table and he smiled at me, I think in gratitude.

“Now that we got our hackles down, what do you think of this hairdressing beautician stuff?” Papa said.