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The 1972 Odyssey
of
Poundso and Baddso
from
Lawrence Kansas to Eugene Oregon
Written in Lawrence 1972 and
Edited in Tokyo 2025
Table of contents
Introduction 7
Chapter One: Leaving Lawrence 13
The Mama Road 15
Departure Day 22
Topeka and Outwards 31
Wichita Vortex 37
Oklahoma City 44
Chapter Two: Leaving OKC 47
Yukon and West 50
Night in Foss Junction 55
A Ride with Menace 64
Amarillo to Albuquerque 68
Chapter Three: Albuquerque and Out 73
Hopping Freights 73
An Interlude with RLS 75
"Hobo Blues" 82
"Peaceable Kingdom" 91
Arrival in Kelseyville 93
Aunt Hazel's Tale 95
Chapter Four: California Back to Kansas 107
A Ride with Navy Joe 111
No to Sacramento 120
At Lake Tahoe 124
El Reno and Winnemucca 129
Crossing the Peak 137
Hitchhiker Phobia 141
Note from the Year 2025 142
Appendix of Poems & Pictures 143
Sources 157
Introduction
It is frequently observed that the notorious decade of the 1960s in the United States was a period of enlightenment in spite of the War in Vietnam. How far it lasted is an open question, the Fall of Saigon in 1976 providing an obvious but arbitrary end point. This issue will not be discussed in this book, but it will be assumed at all points that the reader knows what is going on--including the Manson murders on Cielo Drive on August 9, 1969, which ended the 60s in California.
With full symbolic intention I here signal two events from the month of our departure date, June 1972: First, in Vietnam, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut (Vietnamese) took his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of children running down a road escaping from napalm. Second, the Watergate scandal broke out. Five White House operatives were arrested for burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In the summer of 1972, as Nixon bombed Haiphong Harbor major cities celebrated the downfall of his bellicose administration and its hastening the end of the War. The theruway was blocked by students with clubs hammering the guardrails
In what follows I am nicknamed Poundso and my companion Baddso. Myself, I have no interest in hiding my name, but my sidekick does. I conceal his name as best I can, even on those occasions when the writing that appears in the text is by him rather than me. It is simply marked Baddso. At this date he is alive and well and living in Europe, as am I in Japan.
I don’t wish to minimize his role in any way. The hitchhiking was his baby. He’d done it successfully across various states, and because he was himself a long-distance runner it was his idea to go to Eugene Oregon for the Olympic trials. He was a fan of Jim Ryun of the University of Kansas, at that time (1972) holder of the world record in the mile--his 3:51.1 one-mile mark remained the world record for eight years. And myself, I was going for the adventure, and I was going for the sake of going. That was a notion I later picked up from Baudelaire--partir pour partir--four years later when I taught in Constantine, in the former French colony of Algeria and where my colleague was the late Pierre Joris.
Both the anonymous automobiles and the freight trains that Baddso and I boarded were sealed vessels. We were encapsulated--myself, in more senses than one. I had stopped reading newspapers and listening to the radio by my second year of graduate school. I didn’t want my thoughts to be controlled by the mass media when there was a whole world of good books waiting for me to discover and read. I lived on an ivory tower and I liked it. Baddso, by contrast, was socially turned. He enjoyed people and they enjoyed him. As friends--and we have been friends over fifty years now--we were an odd couple.
On our journey we saw no papers, watched no tv, and heard no radio except for snatches of music and commercials from the cars which provided our rides. Consequently, in what follows, my text ignores the social struggles in the United States in the key year 1972. Ignored here to make way for more primal emotions such as the desire to survive, for food and drink, for sleep.
Days of Rage, 1970
One part of the social struggle, however, we should not have ignored, for it explained the kind of distrust that we would encounter as we crossed the seemingly peaceful plains of our corner of Kansas. The peace was more apparent than real, as we would soon discover the hard way. A big part of our problem was ignorance, in the case of Poundso an ignorance that was the result of his willed and conscious intent to continue living on the ivory tower of great literature.
Each in his own way our two travelers ignored the immediate history of the very university that provided them their livelihood and raison d’ĂŞtre. In the history of Kansas University this is a period now known as the Days of Rage, a phrase that refers to the violence accompanying the anti-Vietnam war protests and the police repression that convulsed the campus in the year 1970.
The key event was the burning of the student union on April 21, 1970 by persons never named much less prosecuted. It provided magnificent photographs that seared themselves on the minds of all those who saw the fire or the newspaper pics. Those most deeply and enduringly impressed would have been the members of the police forces around the state, who would have seen it as a reflection of the destructive power of the anti-war protests and thus indirectly an attack on themselves.
Aftermaths
To what extent the Days of Rage were still heating the conditions of our 1972 journey will be seen. Even so for Baddso and myself, the year 1972 was our Year of Wonders. The more so that now the tale is rediscovered after the passage of fifty years on the basis of an old typescript, itself another wonder.
An apology might be offered for the styles of this book. The dominant one is a home-made stream of consciousness. I had no thought of Joyce and company. The style is simply the way the words came to me. The muse spoke and I wrote.
So, gentle reader, welcome to a tour of Highway America dated 1972. Contents: a can of worms, but as the narrator says, “we’re all bozos on this bus,” and that includes his sidekick and himself. We’re no better than anyone else, though--like everyone else--we may think we are, an illusion of great comfort. The author’s intention is to entertain and instruct, as Aristotle recommends. A judicious use of the table of contents is encouraged, since who would want to read all of this tedious tale of Highway America? Yes, skipping around is not only permitted, it’s recommended. After all, that’s what our two protagonists are doing--skipping around. Many writers do that, but they are not blessed with the discovery of a typescript written half a century ago, in the year 1972, Annus Mirabilis.
My one fear is that in what follows I have not adequately emphasized the joy of the enterprise. Adventure is a joy for women as well as men--that’s why we pursue it. William Blake found it in the birth of every child as it emerged from the cramped but safe darkness of the womb into the adventure of air and light:
My mother groand! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt.
Chapter One: Leaving Lawrence
June 24, 1972
Preoccupations of Poundso
To Carla Jo’s for a bon voyage breakfast, that was our agreement, after which we would take our leave of Lawrence--but not to even begin the meal until nine-thirty when I had been up since six-thirty was a delay not easy to bear. In the thirty minutes from the time I awoke the sun not yet above the horizon, for I had slept but lightly through the night in fear of not waking early enough, had splashed cold water on my face, rolled my sleeping bag and stuffed it into my backpack, and taken a last walk around the yard to look up into the great shading elms and the single mulberry tree, the latter full of the early skittering of squirrels and starlings, and to say a short prayer in silence for the safety of all pilgrims and itinerants, with particular attention to the well being of Baddso and Poundso. What time was that beatified Britisher going to come?
Sat on the west porch in the yellow metal chair that the landlady (a notorious snoop) had provided the previous summer, watching the quarrels of early sparrows and starlings around the dead gray stump where I had thrown the last of the sunflower seeds. Baddso and I had said nothing about what time we would get started and were both pleased by such a lack of structure, a precedent to be followed for the whole journey--as grad students tired from the toil of study we wanted to avoid scheduling--but I assumed something like a seven-thirty breakfast would be sufficiently leisure-like. Eight o’clock by the sun and still no traveling companion, walked down the street to use a pay phone. Yes in those days still too much under the spell of Henry David Thoreau to have a telephone. Walked at a good pace, however, concerned that Baddso would come in the interval and find me absent. Called the Dennings where he was staying and they told me he was just coming in from a run.
--Hi Poundso, he says.
--Are we still going to Oregon?
--Sure, breakfast at Carla Jo’s at nine-thirty. Jerry and I will be by to pick you up. The conversation had alleviated my sense of unease, leaving me to understand that Baddso and I had different notions of how to begin a long trip. Mine originated with my family on those long ago but still remembered drives we made between Oklahoma and California when I was small. My dad liked to hit the road before dawn and be sixty miles down the highway before we stopped for breakfast. Said it gave him a better appetite. Kids didn’t matter. They could pile in the back seat and sleep, though of course we didn’t. Too excited to close our eyes. A three-day drive from our Oklahoma home to Kelseyville in northern California, and we felt the excitement of the pre-dawn adventure. Three kids in the back seat guaranteed to do some fighting, but not enough to distract the driver.
In those years my Dad drove a Phillips 66 gasoline truck for a living.
My dad, his gasoline truck, and my two older siblings, about 1945
He drove safe but he drove hard. Didn’t stop for roadside attractions not even the Grand Canyon, saw only painted colors on the distant horizon. Expected to put in fourteen hours a day behind the wheel and cover close to six hundred miles. Started in Chandler and followed Highway 66 through Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, New Mexico, nowadays estimated by Google at 590 miles, arriving there after dark, with all the city’s colored lights making it up to us for missing the Grand Canyon. That was the first day as we drove it in the early 1950s, but childhood memories are too easy--most cynics are sentimentalists at heart--the narrative needs to go back a half century to get a fact-respecting picture.
The Mama Road
The 1920s now seem far away, the world of Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis, of Prohibition, the Jazz Age, and the Florida land boom, but that’s when Route 66 was born. Conceived in 1926 when talks about a national highway system got serious and Henry Ford had just lowered the price of motor cars, U.S. 66 was signed into law in 1927 as part of a national system of U.S. Highways, although it was not completely paved until 1938. Promoters of the highway wanted it to have a round number (even numbers for highways running east and west, odd for north and south) and had proposed “60” to identify it, but they settled on "66" because they thought the double-digit would be easy to remember as well as pleasant to say. Later it would rhyme with “get your kicks.”
After the new federal highway system was official, a call went out to establish a U.S. Highway 66 Association to promote the complete paving of the highway from Grant Park in Chicago to Santa Monica Boulevard, and of course to encourage driving up and down on it. In 1926 about 800 miles of the planned route were already paved, leaving 1,648 miles of dirt and gravel. In 1928, the Association took a couple of stabs at publicity. The official birthday of the highway was to be November 11, Veterans’ Day. And a "Bunion Derby" was announced, a footrace from Los Angeles to New York City, of which the path from Los Angeles to Chicago would be Route 66. The object was to demonstrate “the Main Street of America,” and various dignitaries, including Will Rogers, greeted the runners at points along the route.
The race ended in Madison Square Garden, where the $25,000 first prize was awarded to Andy Hartley Payne, a unheralded Cherokee runner from Foyil in Will Rogers County, part of the Osage country of northeastern Oklahoma. Payne was one of 275 runners who started the race, of which only 55 ever reached the finish line. He ran the 3,423 mile route from Los Angeles to New York City in 573 hours, 4 minutes, 34 seconds, averaging 6 miles per hour over an 84 day staged run. Payne’s hometown of Foyil was one of the check-point towns along the route. His father was a friend of Will Rogers and had worked on the ranch of the latter's family during his youth. Payne used the $25,000 prize to pay off the mortgage on his father's farm.
Traffic throve on 66 because of the terrain through which the road passed. Much of it was flat and this made it a popular truck route. The decade-long drought of the 1930s saw many farming families--mainly from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Texas--heading west for jobs in California. Route 66 became the main road of travel for these people, often derogatorily called "Okies" or "Arkies." During the Depression the highway gave some relief to communities located on it. The route passed through numerous small towns, and with the growing traffic on the highway, helped create the rise of mom-and-pop businesses, such as service stations, restaurants, and motor courts, all readily accessible to passing motorists. The highway had become a microcosm of the popular culture of America--a fossil-fuel culture dedicated to mobility.
Although in 1938 Route 66 became completely paved, a lot of the road was dangerous. As one popular guidebook reminds the reader, it had been “pieced together from an existing network of promoted trails and unnamed roads, most of which were ornery dirt paths at the time.” The driver today who explores what’s left of the old road along the Ozark Trail can still acquire a vivid sense of what it was like, skirting along blind curves, passing through hills and hollows, perching on shoulderless slabs that bounced over bridges, and squeezing beneath underpasses so narrow that two cars couldn’t pass abreast. In 1941 the highway death toll for Oklahoma was 563, about average for the state in that decade.
Another kind of danger was also beginning to emerge involving hitchhikers, a risk not in the person of the hitchhikers but in the drivers--predators who saw hitchhikers as their natural prey. Charlie Starkweather was born in 1938, the year the road was completed; at the age of sixteen, he got his first car, a 1941 Ford (the same model driven by Courtney Orrell that Sunday night in August when he killed Billy Grayson.) Starkweather was perhaps the first road killer, a subspecies of what would later be called the serial killer.
Route 66 runs level and smooth from Oklahoma City to Chandler, passing near Wellston (the oldest town in Lincoln County and the final resting place of some of President Obama’s ancestors) seven miles west, where the pick-up took place, then past Chandler to Stroud twenty miles to the east, where Billie came from. The big exception to levelness is Chandler itself, where the east-west axis doglegs north-south, navigating a steep hill in order to bring the traffic through town. A persistent rumor asserts that the engineers who laid out the town were drunk and unable to read the blueprint, which called for it to be platted on the level ground to the north.
The main street of Chandler is called Manvel Avenue, but it is simply Route 66 re-oriented as it passes through the town. In 1941 a driver would have noticed two Phillips 66 stations on Manvel, one at 7th Street, the other at 12th. There were stations selling other brand as well, of course. In Chandler, gasoline stands were the only businesses that competed with the churches in number.
Drivers could fuel their cars with Never Knocks at Wellston’s Seaba Station, but mostly they bought gas from “the majors,” Texaco, Conoco, and Phillips 66. Phillips Petroleum Company was started in Bartlesville in 1917 by a pair of Iowa farm boys named Frank and L. E. Phillips and still derives a little income from Osage oil. (The Governor of the state in 1941 was Leon C. Phillips. Though not related to the Bartlesville family, surely his family name was an asset.) In 1927, the company's gasoline was being tested on U.S. Highway 66 in Oklahoma, and when it turned out that the car was going 66 mph, which was fast at the time, it cemented and sealed the idea of "66." The first Phillips 66 service station opened November 19, 1927, in Wichita, Kansas.
In the 1950s, Route 66 became the main highway for vacationers heading to Los Angeles, passing through the Painted Desert and near the Grand Canyon. This sharp increase in tourism in turn gave rise to a burgeoning trade in all manner of roadside attractions, including teepee-shaped motels, frozen custard stands, Indian curio shops, and reptile farms. Meramec Caverns near St. Louis began advertising on barns, billing itself as the "Jesse James hideout." One of these signs was on a barn across the highway from where I lived as a boy in 1952. When I last checked in 2012, the wooden barn had become metal, but the sign was still in place.
For three generations the fortunes of my family in Lincoln County waxed and waned with the road. My grandfather, born in 1891, the year of the Land Run, drove his mules to help grade this stretch of road west of Chandler in the 1920s before there was any thought of a national highway system, when the road was part of the Ozark Trail as well as the mail route from Oklahoma City, and every farmer in the county was called upon to do road work one day a year. My father could remember 66 west of town before it was paved:
A boy name of Carl Brill used to grade it ever day. Four mules on a big ol' grader. They paved it in '26 or '27, along in there. Wasn't quite this wide--they've added a shoulder on to it. It was sixteen foot wide, eight on each side.
The beginning of the end for Route 66, and for many a town that had thrived along side it, came in 1956 with the signing of the Interstate Highway Act by Dwight Eisenhower. He remembered his experiences in 1919 as a young Army officer crossing the country in a truck convoy, who found his command bogged down in spring mud near Fort Riley, Kansas while on a coast-to-coast maneuver. The War Department needed improved highways for rapid mobilization during wartime and for national defense during peacetime.
Stepped-up mobilization for war after December of 1941 showed the need for a systematic network of roads and highways. The War Department's expropriation of the railways left a transport vacuum in the West that only the trucking industry could fill. Production of trucks capable of hauling loads in excess of 30,000 pounds increased to keep pace with wartime demands. Studies by the Public Roads Administration between 1941 and 1943 show that trucks rather than trains transported and delivered at least 50% of all defense-related material destined for America's war production plants. Because Route 66 was the shortest corridor between the west coast and the industrial heartland in and beyond Chicago, mile-long convoys commonly moved troops and supplies from one military reservation to another along the highway.
This, in fact, has been the history of the road since it was paved. The big trucks pounded it to pieces, rain water eroded the breaks in the seal, and the State repair crews could never keep up.
In the early 1950s my father helped to build the first bypass that replaced US 66, driving a Phillips 66 gasoline tanker to service the graders, bulldozers, and earth-movers as they constructed the Turner Turnpike. The new 88-mile four-lane toll road from Oklahoma City to Tulsa, opened in 1953, paralleled Route 66 for its entire length and bypassed each of the towns along the way, thus neatly defeating the purpose of the original highway, which had been to connect the towns to the cities.
The swan song of the old two-lane-highway America may have been Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, appearing in 1957. A Bible of American youth for two generations, the novel describes three round trips from east coast to west and manages to mention neither military installations nor interstate highways. "Somewhere along the line, says Kerouac’s protagonist, “I knew there would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.
"
There would also be killers. Beginning with I-80 in Nebraska in 1958, the years would see the relentless advance of the freeway system, paralleled by the proliferation of killers who were stimulated by that long, open road, handed to them like a dark pearl, permitting the swift and anonymous mobility they required. Charlie Starkweather was born and reared in Lincoln Nebraska, and his murder spree started the year the freeway through Lincoln opened.
The mighty 66, the Mainstreet of America, Woody Guthrie’s “glory road,” the Mother Road in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, is now a broken patchwork of tourist attractions with remnants of the old highway functioning as service roads for rural folk who still cluster around small towns. When I drive down what is left of it, I hear ancestral voices saying, “We seen the first and we seen the last.”
The Lonesome Death of Billy Grayson
The best known killing on 66 near Chandler was that of a young woman named Billy Grayson in 1941, the nearest thing to a landmark that the truckers would have seen along the stretch of 66 where she and a younger friend named Helen were picked up was the Seaba Station, once known as Seaba’s Filling Station and Seaba Engine Rebuilding and Machine Shop. In 1921, John Seaba constructed the filling station near Warwick and the Wellston turnoff. At that time the road was designated State Highway 7, part of the old Ozark Trails network.
The original irregular shaped red polychrome brick station had a five-sided open service bay. The gas pumps, which dispensed the optimistically named “Never Nox” brand, were located in the central bay. Although called a filling station, its additional auto repair function illustrates the growing trend in the 1920s toward full service stations. Brick and metal windows filled in the open service bays in the 1940s, but visitors today can easily see the original brick columns that supported them.
Directly behind the bay area is a detached red brick workshop with a gabled roof, also constructed in 1921. Here Seaba began to diversify. Initially he purchased and reassembled Model T Fords. In 1934, he opened an engine repair shop, specializing in rebuilding connecting rods. As traffic--and car trouble--increased along the Mother Road, the station flourished and by the late 1930s employed about 18 people, among whom was one of my uncles. The coming of World War II and its strict gas rationing sealed the fate of the filling station. Boosted by government contracts to repair the military trucks plying Route 66, Seaba filled in the bay areas and converted to full-time engine rebuilding. A September 1941 article in the Chandler News-Publicist relates that at that time John Seaba was managing “from ten to fifteen men working at machinery valued about $50,000. Their work consists of reconditioning and rebuilding motor parts for all makes of cares, trucks and farm engines.” The business continued but with diminishing profits until the late 1980s, when new owners reopened the station as an antique, gift, and tourist stop.
Internet sites hyping Route 66 tell us that the Seaba Station is “especially noteworthy for the restored, original rock outhouse building, which is a state-of-the-art roadside restroom from the 1920s.” Amenities once included “his and hers cast-iron toilets, which conveniently flushed the entire time individuals sat on the rims.” It is true that this crude outhouse is built of uncut and unfinished sandstone and that is has been designated a historical monument, but the flushing toilets are decades gone. On my last visit (2012), the trashed interior suggested a horror story or one of those toilets in our great metropolises kept locked in order to exclude drug abusers and those seeking sexual encounters. As such, though the chronology is badly wrenched, it seems not an inappropriate landmark for the abduction of Billie Grayson. To make the pick-up, the driver probably would have stopped his car within a hundred yards of Seaba Station.
The visitor to Seaba Station today notices next door the remains of what was once known as the Pioneer Tourist Camp, where the traveler could rent a cottage for the night. In effect, a motel with kitchen facilities, it was a thriving enterprise in 1941. Not everyone was asleep at 11:30 that Sunday night. There was still some traffic on the road--the big trailer-rigs pounded the road to pieces as they tried to make time, and oilfield workers toiling and moiling in the midnight shifts had to get back and forth to work. Occasionally a car would stop at Leffingwell’s gas station, which was open late. An hour later, one of these would belong to Courtney Orrell, as he drove hither and yon trying to build up an alibi for himself. Still, there were few to notice a car stopping briefly on the highway near the Pioneer Tourist Camp.
It is not my intention to provide a road tour. The curious reader is invited to browse the bookstores, where guides to Route 66 proliferate like violets around roadside toilets since what’s left of the old highway is now a tourist attraction. [See Appendix of Poems, “The Town.”] Will recommend one book, however, and that is Jerry McClanahan’s EZ 66 Guide for Travelers. Detailed maps for every mile of the old road from Chicago to Santa Monica, and he sells paintings from his atelier in Chandler OK, the town where Poundso the narrator was born and raised. Jerry’s enthusiasm for the Mother Road brought him into contact with another fan, a woman from Japan (where Poundso has lived for the past forty years) named Mariko Kusakabe who has become his wife and now runs a souvenir shop on old 66 where it passes through Chandler and has an internet site that connects the little town to the big world through a steady traffic of tourists and with 6K followers. On FaceBook, she’s at Nostalgic Chandler OK.
Departure Day
Departure Day, Lawrence KS, 1972. The brief phone talk with Baddso had relieved anxiety about the departure time as I walked back to my front porch and the starlings but still thought how Baddso and Poundso had different notions about how a long trip should begin. Was not so disappointed as to lose all my pleasant sense of expectancy, and pulled the “good gray” Walt out of my backpack to renew old acquaintance with “Song of Myself” as a traveling companion, dependability been proved and tested for a century. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place search another. Hope Vassar, mother of best friend from childhood Joe Sam and two more boys, had a plaque on her wall that said “Never say die. Say damn.”
A proper trip began either on the spur of the moment of its conception or at dawn, the spur moment for the sun to begin its diurnal crossing of the sky--the spur of the day, the moment to go, while the eight-to-five dogs’ bodies lay oblivious on their backs in dim bedrooms, unaware of the imminent arrival of the great star at the earth’s edge. Let the matter go, stretch out in the yellow chair to read. We would get somewhere today and there would be enough mornings to come sure with better beginnings when out of doors we would wake with the day’s first light on our stone foreheads singing like Memnon’s statue.
When shortly after nine-thirty Jerry Denning and Baddso stopped in front of the house, had my pack on the porch, the front door locked for good--I would come back to Kansas but not to this house--and the key given back to Mrs. Rose. So long, Mrs. Rose, landlady forever watching me from her house across the street, perpetually alarmed that the floors of her rental property might not support forever the weight of a piano nor her carpets and furniture withstand the clawing of cats.
On the way to Carla Jo’s--or College Joe as it sounded in Baddso’s British --stopped at a drug store for him to buy a gift and mail some letters. I wouldn’t mind, would I? Not at all, not in the least, these was no sense in hurrying in the heat of the day. Baddso was and remains to this day the correspondingest man I ever knew. I would mail the letters, sure. Baddso had a stack containing applications for a teaching position to junior colleges, almost all of them in California as I saw when I glanced through the addresses as I walked to the post box. Why would anyone want to live in California except to watch the people, of which they had an overdose, fall into the sea when the western edge of it crumbled along the San Andreas Fault. Northern California, where I hoped to spend a week of this trip, was a different kettle of fish, as were Oregon, Washington, and Canada, none of them threatened by the Fault. It was a job for only one year that Baddso wanted, at a small college not yet under the sea.
By 1972, the Beatles lyric had been spinning around on the country’s turntables for three years:
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus's garden in the shade
We would be warm below the storm
In our little hide-a-way beneath the waves
Resting our head on the seabed
In an octopus's garden near a cave
We would sing and dance around
Because we know we can't be found
Not that any of us were afflicted with Beatles mania, too old and full of false assurance for that kind of teenage trance. Despite that however the song and dance rolled on--it would be good to get out of Lawrence for the summer. My friend Barbara Balfour left yesterday to take Mukti her Burmese crybaby to a cat-show. Sat in the car and talked shop with Jerry, whom I hardly knew, his part of the graduate-student floor being linguistics, and the ghettoes of academe had high walls. How are things there? Oh, you know, slow. In fifteen minutes Baddso arrived with a bright package under his arm, something for College Joe. You didn’t mind the wait too much I hope, Poundso. Baddso, all politeness. It’s OK, anything was OK if eventually we would get on the road.
At Carla Jo’s by ten o’clock. She was beginning to scramble some eggs and had a red swelling in her right eyelid. Asked me what it was but I didn’t know a sty from a stick. A sebaceous gland at the edge of your eyelid has an inflamed swelling, I told her unhelpfully--have it seen about today. These looked to be rarely exotic scrambled eggs, a lot of bits and pieces going into that bowl, and now the electric mixer. Good. And bacon going into the skillet. Yes, I would see that it didn’t burn. Now the coffee was ready. Sure I would have a cup. No sugar or cream, thank you. Barry? He was sitting at the coffee table--writing postcards? Where has he been? No, he was writing down the addresses of people in places we might be going to pass through. Addresses College Joe had. You never knew when you’d need the friend of a friend. Not merely the correspondingest but the collegialist person I ever knew, Baddso, his address book was as big as a country preacher’s well beaten Bible.
The eggs bacon and toast arranged on a big Sunshine Superman serving platter, a bit of paprika on top of the eggs to give them color. Lovely, Carla Jo. You have to eat all of it, she said. No problem. Been living on scraps in my refrigerator for three days, getting all the loose ends cleaned up so the rest could be garbaged. Baddso was disappointed that no one else had come for breakfast. He had expected festivities and more people. I liked it like this, fear people, my sometimes lover Barbara in Kansas City.
It was left to me to eat most of the breakfast. Between servings to myself, I urged the others to have some more, but Carla Jo had a bad eye and I supposed Baddso hadn’t been out of bed long enough. Thank you, College Joe. No, don’t open the package now. She walked with us down to the corner of the block wearing an orange sunshine smock, her loose breasts swinging underneath like two puppy dogs wrestling in a sack. Dear Carla Jo, I have admired your amply fleshed body since last summer and your brief blouses. Now I admire your breakfast and am delighted to count you as the friend of a friend. Have that eye seen to, it’s disfiguring. Invited her to join us on our journey. Three would be too many, she said. Barry could stay here, I offered. Two would be perfect. Male and female made He them. But no, she had things to do. Had to go to the optometrist.
At the corner of Schultz Road and 6th Street, better known as Highway 40, Baddso and I waggled our beggarly thumbs and prepared a face to meet the faces we would meet. To the turnpike entrance itself was another mile. Here it was enough to loosen the legs and feel the weight of our packs. Baddso says this is not a propitious beginning. He doesn’t feel like he thinks he should feel, he says. I try to understand without getting superstitious and turning a momentary twinge into a bad omen. Sparrows delight to sit in the sunlight on the telephone wires. They’re rooting for us, singing for our side. The odyssey has begun, let it continue. What do we expect at eleven late o’clock in the morning, choirs of angels. Angels come out with the sun, they’ve all gone home now, but they have left us the sparrows. The pichiku-pachiku of our feathered friends saying in all but words go ahead boys, get on down the road. What do ya want--the Hallelujah Chorus? This IS the chorus. Now go.
I got home from Vietnam in the Fall of 1970, taking a 3-month early out to go back to graduate school. Still knew all the marching songs from basic training, but that was a waste time of my life I wanted to put behind me not revive it in a marching cadence just because I had a pack on my back. The Who had called it a teenage wasteland. No teenager myself when I got there in 1969--I was 23--but I was a teenager in every way. I think I’ve always been a wastelander. Get thee behind me, Satan of Negativity. This morning we’re marching to Zion, only it’s a stroll rather than a march, and the stroll as everyone my age will recall was a dance step. Your negativity won’t see you through, sings Bob Dylan.
On Departure Day 1972 I was wishing I had remembered Dylan’s words a few months ago when I was playing Russian Roulette on the midnight hills of Lawrence after an evening in the Gaslight up near the top of Mt. Oread guzzling beer like the night before Prohibition. Russian Roulette was my way of displaying contempt for life and common sense. Bicycle didn’t even have a light on it. Dare the devil by coasting full speed down the slopes of Mount Oread without slowing down for the cross streets, the fast one-way streets running north and south. Some poor unwashed citizen had the bad luck to be driving south--I can no longer even name the street--when I was rocketing across. As everyone knows, when a car meets a bicycle head-on, the car wins every time. The cyclist becomes road kill, though that’s not the usual term we apply to the stricken creature if it’s a biped.
My guardian co-pilot must have been riding with me, woke out of a coma three to five days later in the Kansas City Veterans Hospital. In another week or so they let me out, and one of my kind friends took me home. It wasn’t my neighbor Prof. Peter Casagrande, though he had driven to Kansas City to see about me as had some other friends. When I got settled in at home, looked for my bicycle, to see if it looked any better than I did, but could’t find it. Asked Pete if he’d seen it. He said yes, he had thrown it into a junk pile and the trash truck had removed it. He was angry with me for my foolishness, but he directed his anger at the bike for having no light. Pete and his wife Pam had four kids the oldest about to start high school and they’d adopted a fifth. Touching the way they cared about kids, even graduate students.
Didn’t have by-pass surgery but a lot of other things by-passed me as I was coming out of the coma. Great thing about VA doctors from the Vietnam War era is they didn’t worry about patching you to a cosmetic standard. They just got you back to where you could function and get back out in the field. The doc said he could put me in a chest cast and I’d come out with a pretty collar bone but I said no thanks, just make me ambulatory. And he did.
Our trip healed me of my gimp. I was healthy by the time we got back though to this day I can still put my hand on the break in the collar bone. Doc didn’t match the edges of the break like you might do gluing a fragile cup back together. He let the two parts overlap and grow back together in their own way. Visits to hospitalized Poundso now shards and shreds from half a century ago. Could name names and recall faces of all my visits but it seems late in the day to spell them out now after the passage of half a century. Belated thanks to all! I don’t remember much. Concussion wipes out memory.
A clearer memory of the Romantic Poetry class took with Pete Casagrande in the summer session of 1971 because that’s where I met Barry and he told me stories of hitchhiking around the country on the strength of his Union Jack which he displayed over his backpack. He stirred the pot and the stew was still swirling. In 2025 he still remembers that class with Pete wearing kaki colored knee length shorts, and he recalls the presence of other familiar faces --that of Carla Jo Essary who would serve us our departure breakfast and that of Bill Thompson, who Baddso went to see in North Dakota.
Dunno when he first proposed that we hitchhike out to Eugene, but it must have been sometime after he’d learned they were running the Olympic trials there and that Kansas’s star runner Jim Ryun would be one of the contestants. His 3:51.1 one-mile mark remained the world record for eight years until broken in 1975. Myself, I associated Eugene with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, nothing else. Remember that bus ride.
Had done some hitchhiking as an undergraduate going to college in Arkansas from ‘63 to ’65. Parents would send me $5 or so for the bus ticket, I’d pocket it and hitchhike. The two lane blacktop roads between Clarksville Arkansas and Chandler Oklahoma were safe as hen roosts in those days, but I avoided freeways, traps for the unwary patrolled by serial killers like Charlie Starkweather. After 1965 had my own car, a‘53 Chevy that had belonged to my Granddad Pounds since he passed in ‘66. I drove hard but not safe but it was only bicycling where I went crazy. The presence of Baddso would prevent any Starkweather stuff from the people who gave us rides. They’d be too fascinated by the way he talked to risk any trouble. And they’d slow down to get a look at the Union Jack draped over his backpack like a full-color pancake.
Topeka and Outwards
We were one block from the turnpike entrance when we dropped our packs with a soft thud to the ground. Baddso arranged the Union Jack prominently to the front of his pack, tells me how the Jack on a pack took him and a friend from Lawrence to Los Angeles and back last August. Don’t doubt him a bit. You people entering the turnpike, anybody want to hear a Britisher talk Brit? Fascination guaranteed. The cars go by--for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Baddso begins to advertise us to the passing cars: university students, M.A.’s, pleasant company, witty repartee, Union Jack, British accent, pleasing to the eye and the ear. I say nothing. Wouldn’t for worlds indicate that I have any question about the efficacy of this spiel or that doubt ever cast a shadow on me.
We’ve been standing here for twenty-five minutes according to Baddso’s watch, which he keeps glancing at, when a big metallic green Mercury station wagon stops just beyond us. Faith at last confirmed. Going to Topeka, get in, says a heavy man in slacks and a sports shirt wearing his hair in a crew cut. He’s short, has a crocodile lip that I distrust, and two boys with him in the front seat who stare at us like blind birds. Baddso has appointed himself the Ancient Mariner in accordance with his oft confirmed belief that Americans are hypnotized to hear him talk. He holds them with his glittering eye--no, he’s just doing riffs on the standard topics, and I enjoy it too. Rave on, Baddso my man, rave on while we get on down the road a ways. Getting wheels underneath us and rolling wakes us to the the glory of motion, movement taking us out of the past where we all live a thousandth of a second behind what’s happening around us into the dazzle of present we never catch up with.
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
It’s like the crocodile-dad has picked up a couple of showmen to entertain his boys, and if that’s the case so what. Stretch my rictus muscles in what is meant to be a smile but fools no one. No problem. This is a performance Baddso and I can keep up all the way to Topeka, which is in fact our first destination, as I now realize. Our ride could have been going to Los Angeles, and we’d have had to tell the driver we’re only going to Topeka, thanks. Baddso’s sleeping bag is there at a friend’s house, and perhaps letters also. I refuse to get frustrated at another hitch thrown into our early start-- it was hard not to ask him why he hadn’t taken care of the Topeka business--along with College Joe’s gift and the mailing of the letters--earlier in the week. This is me getting bothered a bit but not showing it.
Not to fear, for Baddso all is clear. He’s got a theory. If you try to get everything you need to do done before you start somewhere in order to have nothing to do the morning you depart and thereby get away early, you’re sure to discover down the road that you’ve forgotten half a dozen things. That was the theory--put things off so you don’t forget them. Like step on your foot so you don’t forget your shoe. I had wanted us to start off like a movie in which the forces of good triumph, Charleton Heston as Jesus Christ.
I stretch my rictus muscles again into my famous smile, the one I used when Diane Wakoski visited Lawrence. I took the poet to the only place in town to get a drink, Charlie's Chuckwagon Charbroil, Home of Prime Western Steak where Vanishing Pedro said his spiel to Beersuds Bob. Old American-lit scholars wandered through, seedy, pulling on half-pints tucked in back pockets with the detective novels they were hoping to read that night. Are Kansas real? she asked and I showed her my gums, my famous toothy smile yellow with the bile of the Westward Movement. Wheat country I told her. You should see us in September -- lonesomer than a lost hounddog, roasted brown as a naked nut, and far gone as the quinta puñeta. Drunk last night and drunk the night before, I'm gonna get sober and I ain't gonna drink no more. Beersuds Bob.
Our leaden-lipped benefactor is going downtown, which is good--he lets us off near the capitol. Just think of it, declaims Pounds to himelf, we have arrived in the heart of the heart of Kansas, only a block away from the state legislature. You can hear the senators and reps huffing, snorting, shuffling and scuffling with the legislative papers, getting the necessary deals of running a state done (ruining a state dome) or just put off until the next day so as not to be forgotten. Baddso wisely ignores me and pops off to find a pay phone from which he calls his friends’ house. A man who knows the value of friendship--to a penny. No, I shouldn’t have said that. No one home. He dips into his address book and finds another number. Bingo. Before we can say Jack Robinson the car is arriving.
Can’t loiter in this traffic, do the introductions as we drive while saying thanks to these friends of Baddso’s friends. He gives me the hot skinny. These people, the Tharps, are the family who in some non-official way that makes no sense to me are sponsoring his visit to the United States. They have three boys, one about seventeen, who Baddso hitched to L.A. with in August, one a little older who Baddso has roomed with in Lawrence, and one older yet and married--Jim, that is. Lives in Albuquerque and who we’ll visit there. He--or is it Mr. Tharp-- is something like the chief of police for the Santa Fe Railroad’s western division. From Chicago to Albuquerque, says Baddso, Mr. Sharp is a good man to know when you have a run-in with the police. That said, all we have to do is stay on Route 66, which also runs from Chicago through Albuquerque to L.A. They’re kin routes and look-a-likes, the mother road and the daughter road whichever came first. Baddso tells me the story about staying all night in a jail in Salina Kansas courtesy of the police there offering him jail room because he knows Mr. Tharp. Or was it courtesy of his British accent. Anyway, he got homemade ice-cream. That’s the point of the story. Mr. Tharp, or Papa Gene as Baddso calls him, is a good man to know, a friend of many friends.
Good that we stop at the Tharpses even at the last minute, because there is a letter there for Baddso with sixty dollars in it. He jubilates. It’s twice what he had and increases his total funds to $120. Good for six weeks easy and a six-pack every evening. In half an hour Mr. and Mrs. Tharp arrive and sandwiches and conversation circulate. Baddso eats like a man who’s had no breakfast and is beginning a long trip while I put a baloney sandwich and a banana into my belly to guard against any meals I might happen to miss in the future. Papa Gene and Baddso put his bedroll and sack together with some cotton rope. Papa Gene is a Houdini of manual dexterity as is evident all over the house but shows most as he knots the rope on Baddso’s pack. Wander around examining the collection of badges and keys that adorn one wall of the kitchen and the hundred and one hats hanging on another. Admire the idea of having a family of hats for all seasons.
In an hour with Baddso ready, Papa Gene throws our packs into the car and takes us to the turnpike entrance. Once again we begin the big begin, hoping this time to get a little further down the road. Baddso announces the time, two o’clock, all’s well and I keep my limber lip zipped. Can see that at the rate we are beginning I could easily acquire the hard to break habit of bitching. Baddso stands roadside with his thumb out, chest out too so that the Kansas University logo on his T-shirt can be plainly read, and I too hold out a hopeful thumb with the other arm pointing west. Seems silly to Baddso but I figure cars will be more likely to stop if the don’t have to bother their mastodon brains with wondering which way we’re going. The cars go on by and go on by. So does an hour. No, hadn’t expected to do all this standing around with our thumbs in the breeze reminding everyone that we’re bare forked creatures.
My companion also remembers his first acquaintance with Kansas but starting in New York.
I set foot in Kennedy Airport at 4am on an August day in 1970. I remember still the dank odour of the runway tarmac after rain; the fat wobbly backside of the baggage porter and his slow rhythmic gum-chewing; creeping through the labyrinthine NY subway, with baggage, clinging to a student from India on a similar mission to me; the long, long Greyhound ride on wide American highways flanked by magnificent billboards; the thrill of the huge red-white-and-blue entry sign with its mythical bird: "Lawrence, Kansas, Home of the Kansas University Jawhawks."
I was in nirvana.
A none-too-special graduate in Eng Lit, I’d been offered a job at Kansas University. Was ever a 26-year-old Englishman so lucky? I spent my first nights in Lawrence at the home of an affable KU art professor. He and his ancient mother treated me like a long-lost son and took me on an unforgettable tour of the campus in the evening sun.
Baddso also tells me about the time he hitched from the spot where we are standing to Oklahoma City--a relevant reference since that’s where we’re hoping to get to by this evening. Three or four cars stopped, he said, and offered him a ride east, to Lawrence or Kansas City. I keep pointing west like Lot’s wife turned to salt though not because I’m gazing back to Sodom. This wife has a compass for a brain and it points west. Another hour passes further damaging any pristine belief we may have had that people would give you ride if you aired your thumb for ten minutes. Meanwhile the mercury in the thermometer bulb has uncurled itself and is climbing.
summer is icummen in
Lhude sing Goddamm
That’s Ezra Pound’s parody of a lyric from the middle ages about winter coming in. He called it “Ancient Music.”
During my first two years of college hitching from Clarksville Arkansas to Chandler Oklahoma and sometimes back and never had to wait more than ten minutes on an average, fifteen to thirty if it was late at night on a lonely road, but those roads were not freeways, just two-lane blacktop, a much friendlier kind of beast. Baddso counters with a tale of the ease with which he and a friend hitched from Lawrence to L.A. and back. They got one ride that took them 600 miles. What is our problem. A second hour has passed, among with most of my patience--I’m just standing there waiting to find out what will be the next heart ache--when suddenly dew drops from heaven. A driver going west stops, yes west to Emporia, home of Kansas State Teachers College eighty miles down the road. The driver goes to school there, he says, not in the summer but he drives down in the summer to see friends. I’m listening blessing his friendships from the backseat of his Mustang, Baddso in the front seat hypnotizing the listener with his ancient tale. There is an intriguing ice chest nudging my hip on the back seat and a couple of empty beer cans on the floor tell their own tale. Two hours hitching creates a bit of thirst. I take a canteen of water from my pack and pass it around. No one wants any but me. Warm. I wait for the driver to talk himself into a thirst and ask me top pull a cold one out of the ice chest for him. He’s telling Baddso how there’s nothing to do in Topeka. A legislator could have told him that.
Was it about 1970 that the Kansas Attorney General renewed the enforcement of Kansas's prohibition, even raiding Amtrak trains traveling through Kansas to stop illegal liquor sales. He also forced airlines to stop serving liquor while traveling through Kansas airspace. Don’t ever live in the same city with the legislature because they need to leave town in order to drink. Makes them bad humored. Go where there’s a teachers’ college. College-- kids are willing to break the rules since they’re not running for re-election.
The Wichita Vortex
Never expected to find myself in Emporia but here we stand, still without a peep into that ice chest. Don’t care. Too much swilling of the beezo in Lawrence to suit my metabolism. Another reason I’m glad to be out of Lawrence for the summer, all my friends are beezo addicts. On the road we will be Inebriates of air, and air only, and Debauchees of Dew as Dickinson puts it.
Baddso and Poundso get their packs on their backs and here comes Mr. Officialdom from the gate, which is only a hundred feet from us, telling us we’ll have to move back to the other side of a sign that he points to. It announces something bureaucratic like Turnpike Entrance or No Pedestrians or Bicycles Allowed or Please Display Bank-America Card. Are we allowed to become inebriate of air without a Bank America Card? We get on the other side of the sign dividing the sheep from the goats and, hey hey, in fifteen minutes we’ve got a ride. No time at all, God starting to grin on us Inebriates.
Came then a recent model blue Ford Ranchero, one of those hybrid affairs, the back a pickup bed and the front a car. The driver a pretty dark-haired girl of twenty-five maybe. It wrung her heart to see us standing there, where it must be so difficult to get a ride. I’m sitting on the outside favoring my gimpy knee operated on by the VA doc, Baddso handling this conversation too. Yes, a bad spot, thanks awfully for stopping. To me, it hadn’t seemed like such a bad stop, but then we weren’t there long enough to make a thorough evaluation. Of course it was a college town, and Baddso had his Jack on a pack posted and his KU T-shirt prominent. Just before the girl picked us up there was a load of friendly drunk Indians who would have taken us up if they’d had more room. The driver originally from Wichita, on her way back there now, but she’s been living in Chicago. Didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. Myself I loved it all of the one night I was there, foggy with all the streets and tall-shouldered buildings shining in the wetness. Why do you prefer Chicago or Wichita, a town I knew only from brief visits and Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” from 1966 dripping with images from the war in Vietnam.
& holymen I chant to--
Come to my lone presence
into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
The Anti-Vietnam War protesters seem to have left shock marks in Wichita when they visited in 1967.
Our driver prefers Wichita because her parents live there. Yeah. She’s living with them until she finds a job. Yeah. There are no jobs. Yeah. Everybody knows that. Yeah. The Wichita Yeah Vortex. Yeah.
After an hour’s drive we stop at a Howard Johnson’s El Dorado. Driver needs a break. Howard Johnson the original it turned out discovered gold in Kansas, a factoid still known when the turnpike was built. When she gets out of the car we see she has a big white bandage on her foot. Subject for more conversation. Cold soda drinks in Howard Johnson’s and she’s telling us about having her bunion removed. I never knew anyone before who had a bunion, thought they were incidental to growing old. Thought you had to be fat, drink port, and smoke cigars--no, that’s gout. Anyway, I’m interested. She was given only a local anesthetic and got to watch the scalpel-wielders cut on her foot.
For the remainder of the journey to Wichita I sit in the middle seat, let Baddso stretch out his long legs--he’s 6’ 4”-- while I talk to the bunion girl. Not that I care that much about bunions but but our friendship may be sealed by such a revelation. I imagine I detect the odor of sweet delight in the offing. I likable, pretty girl, freckles on her shoulders and fun to talk to but we’re going to make Oklahoma City tonight. Not that we care for schedules but 250 miles the first day seems the least we can do if we’re going to get anywhere. Perhaps just a little extra bit with her to take us to the west Wichita exit. I begin telling Baddso about the problem we face in getting from the east exit where Miss Bunion is going to turn off to the west exit. Fifteen miles, we can’t hitchhike on the turnpike, and getting there through town will take hours. She gets the point but says ruefully she hasn’t the time to take us. Has to get home for dinner. I wonder what her parents are having for dinner. Sigh.
She takes the east Wichita exit, pays the toll, and lets us out of the other side of the ticket booth. Thank you Miss Bunion Brown- Eyes, goodbye. We’ll have to try to get a ride from here, but the west bound traffic is not in the mood. The cars are already on the turnpike or getting on at the west entrance.
We’re standing fifty feet from the toll booth discussing the problem when we hear a harsh voice shouting at us to get away, to go down the approach ramp past the turnpike sign. Such a ranting voice, the guy apparently being a dick just for the joy it gives him so of course we stand where we are talking about what a dick he must be until we figure he’s on the point of calling the highway patrol. He starts yelling again and we stand where we are with our backs to him, the stone embodiments of deafness. Fifty feet is a long distance to hear from, officer. Finally before he has a heart attack we stroll idly in the direction indicated. Where the turnpike boundary splits the incoming traffic into two roads far enough apart that we’re getting to thumb only half of the little traffic that there is. I volunteer to go on up the other road and put out a thumb. If one of gets a ride he can signal the other. We agree I go to the other road--also that the turnpike guard is being a son-of-a-bitch. Then I take up a spot on the other lane. There is scarcely any traffic on either lane and evening begins to spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. In half an hour I’m beginning to wonder if I like Wichita as much as I thought I did from the two good days that I had spent here chatting with Mary Pittman a year ago. Liking or disliking a place depends not so much on the place as who you know there-- simple dimple, dickey bird. The lack of traffic discourages us and soon Baddso and I are walking down Highway 54, Kellogg Avenue, thumbs limply protruding as we go. Life is motion, this is the Wichita vortex, we continue to tramp. Trying to get through the downtown couldn’t be any worse--no, but it could be every bit as bad. A young crew cut in a uniform with chains and badges and belts and driving a City Of Wichita Police car pulls up to us. It’s against the law blah blah blah, he says and wants to see our ID. We both hand him our KU ID cards and soon he sees to his mammalian satisfaction that we both have names and birth dates, certified people, names and photos right there on a plastic IBM card to prove beyond question that we are humans, the genuine articles. He’s a young guy, not yet damned, and once the formalities are over not at all nasty so we try to get a little help from him. A ride. Where is it legal to thumb a ride since the turnpike is also prohibited. There’s a hundred yards between the beginning of the turnpike property and the city limits. We can try there. But there’s no westbound traffic. How about a bus, is there a bus that would go to the west entrance. He wants to know if we have any money and when we say yes he directs us to the Greyhound bus depot four miles away. No, no, a city bus, is there a city bus. Nope, sure ain’t. Then how does a person get through this town--it’s too far to walk. Just have to walk, I guess, he says, being helpful now. You couldn’t maybe give us a little lift. Sorry, he says, and climbs back into his ride.
Now we understand why Wichita is called a vortex. You go round and round like a gerbil in a cage and never get out. Not to mention the bombers they build.
He goes off, after a final threat, something to do with jail, and we walk on, arms dangling. Just remember, Baddso, it’s for our own good, I say. These people are here to help us. And there’s always more than one way to get through a labyrinth. It occurs to me I have a second-cousin lives here, sweet Mary Ann Goble, if I could think of her married name. And there’s Mary Pittman’s mom. I stayed all night there once a year ago, but it was shortly after that time that Mary quit speaking to me so let’s not bother her mom. I give second-cousin Mary Ann a call from a pay phone but there’s no answer. It’s Saturday evening. Baddso consults his address bible, finds a friend of a friend who lives in Wichita. Actually the brother of the Jerry Denning that he was staying with in Lawrence and Baddso’s even met the brother. He gives him a jingle. No answer. I’m liking Wichita less and less. Our packs too heavy to try to walk fifteen miles with them piggyback on the first day out, and even with evening coming on it’s still hot as the left-hand bar of Judgment Day. We agree that our best bet is to go to a Pizza Hut across the street and have a pitcher of cold beer and something to eat. Let the phones cool off.
Mary Pittman I recall spent the summer before last in a small town in southwestern Colorado among the mountains. It’s against the law to hitch in Colorado--what a paradise that must be. Mary spent the summer of 1971 in Telluride. Baddso and Poundso go south of Colorado on 66 going out to Oregon and hopefully north of it coming back, avoiding the carceral state. A pitcher of cold beer in the Pizza Hut, just the thing after the delays of law and the insolence of office. We sit in the pleasantly dim air-conditioned interior and let time pass, waiting to try the phone again. Wichita is a little tough to get through, but we shouldn’t have any more problems like this. In half an hour Baddso gets ahold of his friend’s friend, who agrees to come and pick us up. We’re going to get through Wichita, Poundso, Baddso drinks up.
The friend comes, I am introduced, and sit in the rear seat feeling a bit presumptuous and awkward. There are large dark gray clouds rolling up from the south. Rain. When we’re let out at the exit I can smell it in the clouds. If we spend long thumbing here, we’ll be standing in the dark like ghouls with the fat drops falling on our heads. In ten minutes, I’d guess. Green Dodge slows near us as if to stop, goes on a few feet, then stops and waves us in. A young guy with long blonde hair going to OK City. We’re going to get out of the rain. Baddso sits in back and the kid and Pounds in front talk about traveling. Though he’s not more than nineteen he’s done his share of it, hitching and driving--east coast, west coast, for a while had a fine job driving new cars from one city to another for pay but lost it when a hitcher he’d picked up robbed him and took the car, some guy he’d known briefly in highschool. Most of the time he’s had good luck with his own hitching but once spent fourteen hours waiting for ride. He can have that. That was on Highway 66 not too far east of Amarillo Texas. Finally it was late at night and there was no traffic moving in his direction so he said the hell with it, walked across the road, and got a ride in the opposite direction. I admire his style.
We never do hit the rain. The highway is wet but the clouds mostly blow west of us. The kid is batting the Dodge along at 85 on the wet macadam but he handles it well. Doesn’t bother me--or Baddso either who’s gone to sleep in the back seat, in dreamland before we got ten miles out of Wichita. Had slept half of the time on the rides from Topeka to Emporia and from Emporia to Wichita. Either he was totally pooped or it didn’t take much to make him feel safe. Either way he was a better trooper than myself. I thought most people drove like fools and if you slept while they were driving you were a bigger fool. A driver needs a co-pilot to keep him alert with occasional literary remarks and to read the map.
Oklahoma City
When we get near OK City the kid stops at the commercial edge to use the phone. I do the same and call Joe Sam and Marsha, hoping we can stay with them just sleeping on the floor. It’s eleven-thirty but they are still up, just got back from Chandler, the town where Joe Sam and I grew up. The kid takes us to their apartment, going a bit out of his way to do it. We’ve logged 250 miles today and without a hint of help from the Union Jack.
Hello Brother Joseph, meet Barry. Joe Sam and I gossip about what’s going on in Chandler. Clyde Barret decided not to buy Montgomery’s grocery store. Classmate Connie Walker and husband are enrolled in law school at OU. The viaduct bridge still stands over the railroad tracks. The sun also rises. Joe Sam and I became friends in the 6th grade, how many years ago. I had a big mouth, he had big fists, and he fought my battles for me.
Joseph goes to bed. I offer Baddso the use of the couch but he declines. We both unroll our sleeping bags, crawl into them, and collapse. Wonder if there’s any food in the house. Tomorrow we should hit some country that I haven’t driven through a thousand times, something less familiar than OK City. Possibly Albuquerque, not so far, less than 600 miles. Many years later Baddso would say he had no memory of Joe Sam and Marsha. He just remembered how cold the air-conditioning was.
Joe Sam was a big guy. He liked to sleep under the A.C.
Chapter Two: Leaving OKC
June 25, Oklahoma City
Wake up at eight o’clock feeling like I’ve overslept. All windows are curtained, daylight hardly enters, and our hosts remain asleep. No dawn light in the eyes to wake us. Shave, shit, dress, and wake Baddso. He wonders if he could take a shower, Sure, no one would mind, but myself I’d like to get started. Breakfast? No, we shouldn’t wait. There’s no knowing how late Joe and Marsha will sleep. Write them a thank you note, we can eat an hour down the road when we get hungry.
Outside the morning is bright and warm. It’s a mile to 66 and we hitch as we walk, hoping for a ride but getting none. My pack hurts me and quickly tires my shoulders, one of which has mismatched bones in it, result of being run over by that damned car thirty days ago. The only defense against the mania of cars is to ride inside them or walk on the shoulders, the latter safer but slower. Don’t bicycle, that’s what I was doing, albeit after midnight and drunk. People have no respect--they’ll haul your carcass around like a side of venison, cut your clothes off of you, and read all your identification cards. The roads must be kept clear of the wounded. The weight in my pack rides wrong. It pulls backward, more horizontal than vertical. Baddso’s pack and bedroll are slung on an aluminum carrier, keeps the weight pulling vertically. Smart, a gift from Papa Gene, who knows about such things. He used to be a boy scout leader. I pull my pack off and sling both straps over my good right shoulder.
When we get to 66 we pick a spot just beyond a stoplight to stand, thumbing the traffic as it starts from the light. Baddso arranges the packs, leaning his against mine so that only his shows, the Union Jack a thing of glory in the sunlight and makes it look like we have only one pack between us. The first hour goes pretty fast. During the second, it begins to drag and the temperature to rise. There is a lot of traffic but most of it local, folks going to church on Sunday morning. Ourselves we’re going to praise God in Albuquerque. How about a ride in the back of that pickup. No, the driver doesn’t glance at us. This is Business Route 66 not interstate 40 where we would find more through traffic. Old 66, now the business route, doesn’t join the interstate until west of El Reno, some thirty miles. Go on to church, friends, and the good Lord guide your steps.
Come ten-thirty we’re hot and hungry and we vote for breakfast. See a pancake house a couple of blocks away and we walk toward it, hoping it’s open. Baddso is short-sighted and I have to assure him not only that the place is open that in fact it’s there. I don’t know that it’s open but it seems to me that OKC folks would want something in their bellies before having to listen to them growl through a long sermon. It’s hard to love your brother on an empty stomach unless you’re a cannibal. I’m not knocking cannibals. I only mean that a cannibal wouldn’t let an empty stomach interfere with his religious ceremonies. I remember Ishmael in the early chapters of Moby-Dick waking in bed with Queequeg, who he suspects is a cannibal, and thinking it better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken christian. Not sure whether this is the pre-church crowd or the post-church but the pancake house is jammed with people waiting in the lobby for a table. The waiting are families or large groups and the two of us can squeeze in. After the Pizza Hut yesterday I’m now beginning to get used to the fact that people in a restaurant stare at you when you walk in carrying a pack. We both order wholewheat pancakes and coffee, the cheapest thing on the menu and probably the most nutritious. The coffee left for us on our table in a pot so we can refill at need, a christian idea, and we empty the pot by the time the pancakes arrive and request another. The pancakes are rather thin and tasteless but look at all these syrups: raspberry strawberry apricot coconut banana and honey. We carefully try each. Food is good. Haven’t eaten since the sandwiches at the Tharps’ yesterday afternoon. We take our time, fully agreed that this the way to travel--in a restaurant with icewater coffee and pancakes. A touch of luxury goes well with the general austerity of our program.
Breakfast over, we walk regretfully back out into the heat. OK, church people, we only need one charitable soul to stop for us, one ride going west. Baddso chants his personal ad: M.A.’s, Kansas University, witty conversation, British charm. About noon two young guys in a Mustang stop for us. They say they’re only going a couple of miles but that there is a better place to hitch from there. Thanks, guys.
The driver opens his trunk for our bags and we ride to another intersection. It doesn’t look any better than the first one but thanks for the thought. We haven’t been there long before a shower blows in. Not much of one, raises the humidity more than it lowers the heat. Still, it’s a relief--was beginning to feel the heat, getting a big dizzy and tired. Not used to all this standing with the strain on my bad shoulder. Comes one o’clock and we’re offered a lift to Yukon, about ten miles.
To Yukon and West: AWOL Driver
I tell Baddso we should decline it. If we’re going to be standing all day we’re better off her where we can call Brother Joseph for relief than in Yukon where we know no one. One-thirty and a white ‘61 Chevy pulls in just beyond us and waves us to come on. Baddso walks over to speak to the guy and I pick up packs and follow at a slower pace. He’s going to El Reno, Baddso yells at me. That’s good enough, let’s go with him. El Reno is thirty-five miles. If we can’t get big rides we’ll take the little ones and add them up. The main thing is to get moving and keep moving.
When I get a look at the shave-headed driver and two-minutes worth of the way he mishandles this wreck of a car, I begin to wish we hadn’t been so anxious to get moving. The man is a maniac, the car is a wreck, and he’s driving like a damned fool. He looks to be twenty-five, has a cruelly shaven head, wrinkled brow, thin twisted lips, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and dark glasses. He speaks with a severe speech impediment complicated by a foreign accent that I can’t place. If he didn’t have tattoos on his arm I’d say he was AWOL from Army basic training--but you don’t get those until after basic, and then your hair grows out. The upholstering of the car is torn and filthy, there are dirty clothes and junk scraps lying about, and the steering on the car is loose. He herds the car along tacking from one side of the road to the other. The car heads off at one angle and he hold the wheel until it gets to the edge of the lane, then he turns the wheel a half round to compensate and we veer forward to the other side of the road. Back and forth at seventy miles an hour. The four lane highway has no center median so we’re playing chicken with the oncoming cars. In a few miles the road narrows to two lanes. Suddenly there’s a farm truck ahead of us and I’m sure we’re going to ram it from behind. I brace and mutter an obscenity, Shavehead finally sees him and slams on the brakes. We’re dead, we’re dead. No, somehow still alive but for how long. I’m sitting back there with my asshole screwed to the seat covers and saying little prayers for Shavehead like I was his mother. Dear God please allow him to notice that’s a tractor ahead of us and from now on keep the farmers in church on Sunday. It’s only thirty-five miles, he gets caught in the traffic on the two-lane and has to slow down and the traffic carries us to El Reno. He lets us out and I say a little prayer for his safety, won’t do any good but it’s the best way I know to say thanks for the roller-coaster ride. He said he was going to Kansas, to screw around he said. I tell Baddso he’ll never make it. Why do you say that? he asks innocently. I curse him roundly and squarely and any other way I can drive the peg in the hole but I can’t convince Baddso that he was in any danger. He walked through the valley of death and feared no evil. I vow to myself never to take him to an amusement park, he would go to sleep on the roller coaster. From now on, I tell him, I’ll help you decide which rides to accept, But Poundso, he says, we’re getting so few rides we can’t refuse any. The hell we can’t.
Walk on through the west edge of El Reno, residential area, small round white blooms of morning glory along the sidewalk, in the sun and the shade of the post-oaks and Chinese elms. The last leisured morning I woke in Lawrence it was about seven, a ray of sunlight slanting through a crack in the brown flowered curtains, Barbara on her side side facing me, asleep. The glory that she wears in the morning in bed, her mouth strangely richly red, around it the long chaotic fall of the black hair across the bedding. There is a gentleness in the room, sleep warmth of her sleep-heavy limbs--slowly I too go back to sleep. I have been faithful to thee, Barbara, in my fashion.
Stand at this corner and hitch, near the English Village Motel, a huddle of small white peeling buildings. The atmosphere produced by names like Oklahoma, Albuquerque, San Francisco--they’re all the same stress pattern. No they’re not. The sun is behind us now, don’t have to look into it, warm on the back of my outstretched arm. Now here are the poor folks in the old pickup that we turned down in Oklahoma City. They’ll take us a few miles out of town where there’s an intersection. A better place? OK but I thought you guys were going to Yukon. They were only stopping thee for fifteen minutes, they’re living north of El Reno somewhere.
The pickup takes us four miles, then we’re standing in the country by an intersection. The cars blip by. In ten minutes one of them stops, bless me, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I give him a friendly hello as he rolls down his window, try to act as if he didn’t have all those red lights aerials chains badges. He just wants to make the highways safe for christians on a Sunday outing. He wants to know where we’re coming from, where we’re going to. Wants to see some identification, verification of human status, here you are officer. A young guy, not grown nasty yet, I try to get on his human side, try to get a ride out of him to I-40 by giving him a bit of sad story. He agrees we’d better off on I-40, which is only three miles away, and tells us to get in and he’ll take us there. Not only takes us to the Interstate but he drives down it a mile until he finds an overpass for us to stand under so we can get out of the sun. Kindly done, Officer Fosdick, we thank you, our mothers thank you. A man’s a man for all that and don’t let them tell you different.
So we put our packs out in the sun, the Union Jack facing west, and one of us stands by them thumb beseeching in order to be clearly visible to the approaching traffic while the other sits in the shade. Baddso uses his watch to keep us switching at ten-minute intervals. He has a passion for both fairness and chronometry. Time passes faster for me standing by the backpacks than it does sitting in the shade. In the shade there’s nothing to do but think about where you are compared to where you’d like to be, while in the sun you can work on each car as it comes past, mastering its detail, giving each a fulsome effort as if it were the only car on the road. Get the model name, read the license tag. I have small routines that I do with body language, arm and thumb, to let a car know that it is the one in particular that I am depending on and asking to stop.
In my mind I was critical of Baddso for standing there like a cigar-store Indian, his face expressionless, his arm horizontal the elbow and then vertical at a right angle and unmoving as well. Do it with feeling, Baddso old friend.
Poor ol Kaw-liga, he never got a kiss,
Poor ol Kaw-liga, he don't know what he missed,
Is it any wonder that his face is red?
Kaw-liga, that poor ol' wooden head.
The joke in this song is on me. As a kid, I thought the Indian’s name was Elijah, like the prophet. Years later, reading a book about country music, I discovered his name was Kaw-lijah, with a “K”. Still more years later, when the song would replay it my head it was again Elijah. There’s a theme for Wordsworth--the non-growth of a poet’s mind. But I was a poor poet, and such growth as my mind had was largely an accumulation of trash in a teenage wasteland. It made sense for the powers-that-be to send me to Vietnam, which Peter Townsend and The Who called Teenage Wasteland (“Baba O’Riley,” 1971). This is Baddso’s revenge on me, if he wants it, for he loves the hard rock of The Who.
Going back to the hitchhiker’s posture, I was about to say that I had several small routines that I’d do with body language. I liked to hold my arm straight and far out from my body at forty-five degrees from the vertical, almost like a distress signal until the driver got close enough to see the thumb. As he came closer I would lower my elbow until the upper arms was horizontal and make backward sweeps with the lower part of the arm, the sweeps shorter and faster as the car went by, hooking the thumb into him and eyeballing him like Davy Crockett staring down a bear from a tree. The cars went on by, so my jive techniques were no better than Baddso’s wooden routine. He stopped as many cars as I did. Almost as if the driver had his mind made up to to do what he was going to do in advance and didn’t care we did or how we looked. (Remove the initial “almost” from that sentence.) Maybe he just wanted to check our faces for signs of advanced venereal disease.
Sit in the shade, stand in the sun, down and up with Baddso calling the signals from his watch. I persuade him to make it fifteen minute intervals so that we’ll be changing less often and the periods when I’m doing the thumbing won’t be quite so short. And when he’s doing the hitching, I’ll have time to walk around. I clamber up the embankment and come out of the farm road overhead. There’s a farm house a mile away, a pond between us. Perhaps take a swim toward evening--anywhere around here we can sleep? Among the trees by the pond? But it’s only three-thirty. I stagger down the embankment and suddenly Baddso has caught us a fish. He speaks to the driver then motions me to come. I’ve got the packs, thirty pounds in each hand. Feels like forty but I’m chugging like a locomotive.
A Night in Foss Junction
Jeezus, it’s good to ride on wheels and feel the earth moving under you. The driver is a black man of about thirty
and explains that he always picks up hitchers on this stretch of road, which he drives every day. He’s turning off the interstate at a town called Foss, fifty miles away. He works in a reformatory in El Reno driving back and forth from his home in Burns Flat near Foss everyday. Where have I heard of Burns Flat. The grandparents of the girl who took us to Wichita live there. I’d told her I never had heard of it, and now I’ve heard of it twice. Why don’t you live in El Reno, you got folks in Burns Flat. No, too much discrimination in El Reno, no one there will rent him a decent home. In Burns Flat they got a nice house to live in, which they’re buying. He must get tired of this fifty-mile drive every day. Me, I’d live in a refrigerator crate before I’d drive a hundred miles a day. What sort of redeeming liberalism does he find in Burns Flat for Christ’s sake when the whole state is Jim Crow. In Oklahoma, the larger towns are usually a little looser in their tyranny than the smaller ones.
Our friend has a tape player to while away the driving time and I sit back to listen to it. I turned you on, now I can’t turn you off. Oklahoma goes by the window and I hardly look at it. I’ve already seen too much of it in the first seventeen years of my life before college and a couple of years spending summer at home. Scattered farms, cow pastures, muddy ponds, dry creeks, johnson grass green in the fence lines. We pass Weatherford and Clinton from a distance, tiny “stopping over places” [see poem no. 1] with huge chamber of commerce signs advertising them as the Carthage or Athens of western Oklahoma.
I know the word foss, an old word but Shakespeare still uses it. It occurs in the first canto of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, where he follows Homer’s Odysseus in trying to visit the underworld --a journey called the Nekyia in Greek-- in order to hold converse with the great dead, especially those who had died at Troy. The communication with the dead depends on bringing blood to the ghosts. Without fresh blood they cannot speak:
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead
I’ve always had a taste for grave yards, though I dare say my sidekick Baddso wouldn’t be caught dead in one. As for foss, I can always think of the American comic-book detective Fearless Fosdick. If Foss Junction commemorated anyone, it was doubtless a local landowner.
When we arrive at Foss Junction I’m relieved to see semi-civilized amenities--a gas station and truck stop advertised 200 yards down the Foss Road.I always thought I disliked gas stations for their dirt and squalor (my father ran a couple of them kept scrupulously clean) but in this kind of country you cherish them as standard bearers of civilization. A place to wash and crap and eat, nothing else you could ask. Except a ride, except a ride, out of this forsaken cow-lot. We find an eight by twelve grocery store, snacks and beer for truck drivers. I have a vienna sausage sandwich, made from a heavy loaf of homemade wholewheat bread we’ve been carrying in the pack, and a quart of cold milk. A foul tasting sandwich. The canned potted meat is nearly putrid and the bread has taken on the flavor of the pack, orange nylon. Baddso has a sandwich like mine, a piece of watermelon, and a quart of milk. There is a big truck taking on fuel and the driver is standing in the door of the cab putting food and drink in an ice chest. Beezo for the road. I talk to him, ask him for a ride. Nothing doing, safety and insurance regulations, he’d lose his job if were seen--up and down the highway are safety inspectors in the limbs of every large tree. Otherwise, sure, he’d give us a lift. Every trucker would tell the same story. They don’t lack sympathy for the walking poor. That’s why when you raise a thumb toward them they throw up their hands or make some other helpless gesture from the wheel, meaning there’s nothing the driver can do. Who ain’t a slave, asks Melville’s Ishmael from the deck of a whaler in the 1840s.
Back on the highway, the traffic streams west. I’m dead tired and sleepy from eating too much crap food, Shoulda known better. Hunger traps the hungry. In two hours we stop nothing but a Highway Patrol. He looks at our ID cards--how does he know that I really am who that card says I am? I could be a lie but he doesn’t care. The card makes me legal. I might in fact be Jack Guthrie, brother of the famous Woody and probable author of “Oklahoma Hills” and spitting on the interminable steps of the halls of justice. I’m only half listening to this prick who is reciting his catechism. Father, I ask, what shall a man do to hitch through Oklahoma. My son, thou must shun the shoulders of the road. restrict standing to the drainage ditches, and this above all, stand never beneath an underpass. I tell our highway mentor that I appreciate the instruction, which we were especially in need of because of the confusion planted in our minds by the compassion of one of his colleagues who earlier in the afternoon let us out of his car to stand in the shade of an overpass. He must not have known the law, comes the blustering reply. God help him, he didn’t know the law. They can really hang him high for that.
Many months have come and gone
Sincere I wandered from my home
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born
Having instructed in the way we should go and from which we should not depart, the guardian of the moral order heaves himself into his black and white patrol car looking like a great holstein cow wearing chrome shackles. Exuding no milk of human kindness.
Milk of human kindness? you ask. This is the Washita River country where Custer’s cavalry massacred the village of Black Kettle in 1868. The Indians would get their own back at the Battle of Little Bighorn eight years later, but a dark and bloody road leads directly from here to the killing fields of Vietnam, giving rise to the anti-war poems of Robert Bly exposing our “hatred of men with black hair.” Of course we don’t know how many braves (and their wives and children) died here because we never count the bodies of men with black hair--not in Korea, Nam, or the old west. Today the Black Kettle National Grassland lies north of here. During the Dust Bowl the US government bought farm land from farmers who left for California and used the space to establish this National Grassland. Baddso, you and I form the tail end of that distant migration.
In two more hours darkness falls. We’ve come 89 miles this humid Sunday in Oklahoma. We’d better have a six-pack so we can sleep without remembering that statistic. We get the beer and find ourselves a bare spot on the side of a hill away from the truck stop. Sit here and watch the traffic lights out on the highway. Tomorrow we’ll get a ride to Albuquerque, sure thing. Eighty-nine miles today, six hundred tomorrow. Damned mosquitoes--slap! What I want to know, Baddso is--slap!--why there is no respect for --slap!--the Union Jack. Poundso, last fourth of July while I was in Lawrence a dog pissed on me. Slap!
We finish the beer, undisputed highlight of the day, surcease of frustration and heat, and spread the bags to sleep. Slap! Thinking--slap!--how fine it is to sleep under this big sky swarming with stars--slap!--wake up tomorrow with the sun and ride to Albuquerque with a nymphomaniac in a Cadillac and two six packs --slap! slap! In New Mexico they have a sun on the license plates of the cars and on the flag--slap!--a sun with twelve rays emerging--slap!--three to a side.
The ground is littered and slick with the corpses of the slain but the mosquitos keep coming. Slap! slap! Where the clever bugs find enough moisture to breed in this aridity and the nearest pond a mile away defies reason. Baddso and I roll up our bags and go look for a lesser degree of infestation. We walk toward Foss, a mile and a half away, down a narrow winding blacktop road. A dark house every hundred yards or so, a dog barking among the broken fences and parked cars
in the yards. We spot an unused gas station, boarded up, but all the doors hasps and locks on them. A screw driver would give us entry but we have none. We come to a railroad track and see boxcars lined up in the moonlight, dark rectangles in the sides of the cars are open doors. Hospitality by the Santa Fe. You can’t close the doors but the presence and walls and a roof might keep a few mosquitoes away. Not enough, probably. We leave our and investigate the downtown area, a few broken down buildings under a single street light, most of them appearing unused. Step inside through a broken window, old sacks of feed, scurry of rats, filth and scattered feed an inch deep on the rotting planks of the floor. The boxcar seems preferable. At least it nay be a tad cooler. This place still holds the heat of the day. I stand outside, resigned, but Baddso wants to look around some more. Let him. Stand in this empty town. Do people live here, get up to eat breakfast in that trailer across the street, buy groceries, walk past the old men who must live in a town like this, sitting on the smooth benches in the morning while the buildings provide shade. Miraculous perpetual life going on around them.
Many a page in life I’ve turned
Many a lesson I have learned
And I know that in those hills I still belong
Baddso emerges from the darkness a hundred yards a way into the light of the street lamp with a yellow dog yapping at his heels, walking fast so it can’t piss on him. He suggests we go back to the auto junkyard and find a junked car to sleep in. Noticed several parked around a nearby gas station, a kind of salvage yard but some of the cars in decent shape. I pick out a ‘59 Chevy convertible, the top is up and in one piece, crawl into the backseat--still has cushions--take off my shoes, spread the bag after turning it over once to discourage creeping crawlers, and I’m asleep before you could say Fibber McGee. Not to mention--what was her name . . . . Molly.
Barbara and her mom in the living room near a console
piano screaming hysterically at each other, what is the argument about. She argues with her mother like Kafka with his father. A small child sits by the pedals of the piano, in the shadow of the the black cabinet. White suited men take Barbara away in a dog catcher’s truck. They give her pills to calm her, thorazine, and when they arrive at the asylum they remove her straight jacket. She is calm, resigned, accepts the job they give her dusting. Everyone in the asylum is old, wrinkled, skin lying on sharp bones like tarps yellowed by time and thrown across jumbled parts of small machinery--electric mixers and washing machine motors. The old people must be dusted too.Under the arms and around the crotch and face. Keep the orifices open. Muzak is piped into the room perpetually. I come on Sunday afternoons to see her, bring her a large book about classic film but she will not look at me. The people in charge will not let her leave with me. They tell me she is happy, leave her alone, she works well with the muzak playing. But, I protest, she has forgotten her own name.
Wake up shivering. The dew has soaked the convertible top and the damp has penetrated the sleeping bag. Absolute interstellar quiet. Wipe some moisture from the window to see out. The town under its one streetlight, the railroad cars in statuary repose as if a soundtrack had stopped, cosmic quiet and solitude. Counting the last one and a half on foot we have come ninety and one half miles today. No way to get warm till daylight comes.
Second waking, still Monday 26 June, Foss Junction, Oklahoma badlands. In a car somewhere among strange surroundings, cold as a clump of sage brush, clothes and sleeping bag damp, moisture condensed on all the windows, can’t see out. Six rectangular planes of beaded translucence. Roll down the window--it works!--and see in the gray predawn light the rusted hulks of automobiles squatting among shining bedewed weeds, broken hogwire fence to keep out the desperate and itinerant, boxcars lined up along the curving railroad embankment stretching off to the east, curving away like the Kaw River from the Lawrence Bridge. Desolation row but something wakes in me.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
I get out of the car, hobbling stiffly, grab my bed roll. I’m the only life in this world for forty miles until I find Baddso bedded down and folded up three cars away asleep in a sedan. The innocent sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care. Daylight has come, let’s move, let’s move. We’ll get a ride out of sympathy, two weary ones with packs by the road at dawn. Drivers will know we’ve been out here all night all night and a long way from home, planning no evil. Who would stand out all night just to pilfer your nickels and dimes, that’s the question.
Baddso stirs, groans, disentangles his limbs from his wagon bed, comes out of hibernation crawling backward like a bear whose cave was too narrow to turn around in. The whole six foot four inches of him. We walk through the weeds to the boxcar where our packs await, then on we go to the road, past the eternal gas station of the night before, past houses with dogs too sleepy to bark, down the approach ramp, onto the freeway. Lots of traffic going west. License plates read Texas
Arizona New Mexico California, Oregon Washington. Jack Horner sticks a thumb in the pie, pulls out a plum, and says what a good boy.
I’m all expectation, like on those mornings as a kid staying with my grandparents on their farm near Stroud in the summer and we’d get up early to go fishing. The surface of the pond would be a perfect gray placidity broken only by the rings made by a rising fish--imagine a huge bass, a lunker, feeding in the early morning while the surface of the water was cool. I’d seen pictures of them in Sports Afield and such glossy mags. But lunkers bite only when they’re of a mind to and the fisherman gets lucky. Never caught one. Even so, expectation rises to the surface and makes rings in the water. Now is the time to be standing by the road, the time the fish feed and memorable events occur. Thoreau said “Morning brings back the heroic ages.” Walden somewhere.
The walk from Foss to Foss Junction keeps me sufficiently occupied. I remark that we appear to be in God’s pocket, as on this earth even in Badlands Oklahoma and the cowlots of Foss the traveler cannot but essentially be, but get no response for a moment till Baddso says that our good fortune was on us in a manner so subtle as to be scarcely discernible to him. The cars, like the lunkers in Granddad’s pond, go by without biting while the sun wheels higher, well above the horizon now, drying our clothes, bringing welcome warmth to chilled flesh but becoming more and more its less welcome summer self beginning to burn again yesterday’s redness. Lhude sing Goddamm. The sun will strike our foreheads as as we walk backward facing east to hitch west. Travelers, fishermen, and heroes emit music at sunrise. The colossi of Memnon sing at dawn on the West bank of the Nile in Luxor.
By eight thirty my rising hope has faded away and I’m reduced once again to the stoic mood expecting little now that the flush of dawn is gone and the day starts to belie in its habitual way the promise of its own beginning. If abandoned cars form caves, Baddso and I are the cavemen emerging in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Caught in this mood of resignation, this careful unthinking stance prepared for the endurance of another disappointing day, feel neither surprise nor delight when a white ‘63 Chevy stops for us. They stop because it is still morning and unthinkable that we could stand out here from such an early hour without someone stopping. There are three men in the car, one of them a black man with a badly matted Afro who introduces himself as George, cleans the clothes and suitcases out of the backseat and puts them in the trunk to make room for us.
A Ride with Menace
We leave Foss Junction in a squirt of exhaust fumes, fifteen hours there our longest wait. Wonder if Baddso is still keeping track of our waiting times and averaging them like baseball stats. He’s talking with the front seat people, telling them of the fifteen hours and thanking them in an excessively polite manner--no, nothing excessive about it, Christ on the cross fifteen bleeding hours. The threesome of men are a dubious combination and oddly sorted. A heavy guy with shaggy sandy hair cut around his ears in driving, named Terry. He and George sitting in the middle are about the same age twenty-five to thirty. The third man in his forties, uncombed curly brown hair, wearing a T-shirt, he talks like he’s from Arkansas. All three exude an air of marginal criminality. Menace. Either of the white guys could be another Charlie Starkweather. I’m afraid Baddso may be an Othello with too much fundamental decency to recognize an Iago.
The name of the man on the right’s is Old Roland I learn from George who goes through a long routine trying to remember it. He fills us in on their history. Me and Terry’s old buddies, ain’t we Terry, punching his mate in the ribs. The way George says the name it sounds like Terrah like the British pronunciation of terror. Me and Terrah’s drinking beer at the Sundown Club in Tulsa last night and we wasn’t thinking about no Seattle, was we Terrah (punch), and Old Roland here comes in, been driving from Little Rock, going to Seattle to get a job, he comes in and we get to talking to the waitress, man she was built like a stone shithouse I ain’t kidding, ooh I’d like to got me some of that. He grabs his crotch with both hands and squirms in the seat, moaning in an ecstasy of thwarted anticipation. Old Roland is going to Seattle so what do we care, me and Terrah decide to go with him. Sheeyut, Seattle, man’s there’s women in Seattle. Baddso, myself, and these three bozos all with the same destination--the extreme northwest. Sheeyut.
George’s monologue goes on until no one is listening any more, repeating punches in Terrah’s side to get him to verify various points but never giving him time. The only other thing of interest I pick up from George is that they’re going to Amarillo where Terrah is expecting to pick up some cash money, the details of which are left vague. Taciturn Old Roland comes out of his apparent sulk in the corner to volunteer various bits of information already communicated to us by George. Old Roland says he’s from Arkansas by God and that he never saw these guys before last night when they all got drunk and took off together. He just wanted someone to come to Seattle with him. It’s his car by God and they’d better drive it right or they was a reckoning a-comin, no more of this bullshit driving, no more of this hundred and ten shit like Terrah was doing back down the road. I hastily agree with Old Roland that a car as to be treated right if you want it to treat you right and to get somewhere as far as Seattle. The car, as if to state its own opinion of bullshit driving, begins to register hot and Terrah pulls into a gas station to investigate. The car is three quarts low on oil. Old Roland is mad, claims the car never used to use no oil and by God people’d better start driving his car like it was supposed to be drove.
Terrah and George agree, obviously humoring Old Roland, buy oil, we’re running down the freeway again. Western Oklahoma is whizzing by under our wheels--Canute, Elk City, Sayre--but I’m too busy watching the antics in the front seat to pay much attention. Old Roland pulls a pint of whiskey from out of somewhere, gulps the remaining swallow left in the bottle, wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand, and embarks on what is evidently a serious subject. You fellers got any money to help us with gas? Me and the boys here has spent our last cent on this trip, then buying that oil busted us. This is said quite confidentially, and I give it the attention it warrants, rubbing my chin ponderously, consulting with Baddso about the state of our finances, finally replying that I reckoned between the two of us we might be able to come up with two dollars. Thinking while I was rubbing my chin that it would not be wise to let Old Roland know that Baddso and I had a hundred dollars in travelers checks between us and calculating that a hundred and twenty miles to Amarillo at twenty miles a gallon is six gallons times thirty cents a gallon is a dollar eighty, so two dollars ought to get us into Amarillo.
The gas gauge is reading empty and Terrah pulls the car into the next station, where Baddso and I scrounge about and come up with a wrinkled dollar bill and four quarters. This is Sayre, a town dear in my childhood memory of driving 66 to California and back every year. Instead of stop signs and street lights it had great dips in the intersections designed to slow the traffic. If you took one too fast you could bottom out, tearing the guts off your car’s underside. My Dad took the dips slow, but fast enough to give us kids a thrill in the back seat as we sank and rose. As a kid it was a a gas to ride through Sayre, but I think by 1972 they had filled in the dips, or I was too worried by Old Roland and the gang to notice. Terrah is told to find a coffeeshop and stop. He goes slowly through town, past some places that look to me like coffeeshops, on out to the edge of town. Well, says Old Roland, let’s get some beer then. Terrah pulls into the nearest bar, which is open though it’s nine-thirty in the morning, and George is sent in for a sixpack. George apparently is not so busted as Old Roland claimed. He emerges shortly with a six-pack of Coors in bottles, and I know that a sixer in a roadside liquor shop in Oklahoma costs a dollar eighty. I’m confirmed in my original suspicion that Baddso and I are being taken for a ride. Can see by catching his eye that he knows it too.
George offers a beer to Baddso and me as we drive back to the freeway but we decline politely. They have two apiece. When a bottle is to be opened, it is handed to George who does it with his teeth, neatly and with evident pride. When a bottle is to be disposed of it is handed to Old Roland who throws it with all his strength straight down onto the pavement where it explodes with a faint rearward tinkling crash that seems to delight him.
Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law
pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Kidneys primed, they soon need a rest stop, and when no trees appear or other cover in five miles Terrah stops on the shoulder and all three piss, laughing and lifting yellow arches while the cars go by. We travel toward Amarillo, Terrah now talking, telling anecdotes in which he figures as a swashbuckling hero, George confirming the stories and grabbing his crotch at every mention of a woman. And Old Roland gently asleep in his corner.
My calculations as to how much gas we would need to get to Amarillo were optimistic, by round numbers too small. Sixty miles from Amarillo Terrah stops for two more hitchers. Four bodies and as many packs squinched together in the back seat. One of the new guys is quite dark, perhaps American Indian, and wears a panama hat with a red band of Indian design around it. I greatly admire the hat. He wears a leather vest and carries a crudely made wooden cane. The other is blonde, quietissimo, and reading a book on Yoga. Forty miles from Amarillo Old Roland launches into his sad song again, got to have some gasoline boys. Sure says the blonde, glancing up for only a second, as if any amount of gasoline at any price is both agreeable to him and expected. At the gas pump the dark guy scrounges for change, comes up with fifty cents, and the blonde throws in a dollar. We have enough gas to take us to the next station.
From Amarillo to Albuquerque
Baddso and Poundso exhausted with our ride by the time we arrive. Let off in the middle of Amarillo in the driveway of a gas station, Poundso happy to stand for a moment stretching limbs and feeling the sun on him, and above all the blessing of being intact. We stand for a moment at the edge of the apron talking about which way to walk and we get interrupted by the attendant who tells us we can’t stand on the drive. The other two hitchers walk away, but I haven’t been in Texas long enough yet to remember what I know as well as anybody, that most Texans are savages, so I keep talking to Baddso, who appears too shocked by such unexpected and unnecessary rudeness to move. Telling him about a place we can eat, Underwood’s Barbecue, ate there in ‘65 and remember that for a reasonable price you get decent food and all you want. The attendant is back reddernecked and ruder than before, telling us in unmistakable terms that we can’t stand there. I’m hungry and reply that we have no intention of taking up residence, an irony over the head of the target. I grab my pack then grab Baddso who I see is getting angry, and we stroll off. I explain to him what being British has kept him from knowing, that all Texans are rude, and that he mustn’t expect courtesy from them nor allow them to anger him. Just pimp them a little if you like and then go on your way.
We’re pretty happy with ourselves and our escape from the trio of dangerous drunks. Only eleven o’clock and we’re come twice as far as we did all day Sunday. A hundred and sixty miles before breakfast, sheeyut as George would say. A wash and a quick shave at Underwood’s, eat lunch, and we begin to feel civilized again. Like yesterday in the pancake house, sitting in a restaurant eating makes you feel like a successful traveler. Makes you want to stay a while. Baddso is especially happy because he’s taken a crap. Didn’t have one yesterday and the irregularity was troubling him. That was why he reported to me every time he farted big, about once an hour, but as the days wore on and other days with them I realized that the subject had an intrinsic fascination for him. He harked to every internal movement and was proud of every excretion. Good toilet training? Different strokes for different folks. (Sly and the Family Stone, “Every Day People,” 1968.)
After lunch we walk to the west edge of town and start hazing the traffic again. A technical institute in town and we get a lift to the campus from a couple of longhairs who go to school there. They explain to us how to get to the freeway, three miles away. We walk it, walk fast in spite of the noon heat with the pack tearing at my shoulder every step. Feels like the break in the bone has jagged edges that catch in the muscles and ligaments and shred them with every step, can’t wait to get to the freeway and flag a ride out of this state.
When we get to the freeway we discover mirabile dictu our fellow hitchers of the morning Meanie, Minie, and Mo sitting at the edge of the overpass with a sign reading Los Angeles and their thumbs out. Call them after Walt Kelley’s three tippling bats Bewildered Bothered, Bemildred. One of the Bats complains that he doesn't know who he is and has to go without pants for ten days while he waits to see if someone claims them at the police station. Pogo says, "It's easy--you're the one without the pants." Two hundred yards past them are a guy with a chick, one sitting and one thumbing. Baddso and I go past them another two hundred yards and set up shop. After an hour we start taking fifteen minute shifts, one of us resting, one standing. Baddso can’t understand why we have done so poorly at getting rides the last two days. Our looks? We’re plenty dirty by now and neither of us has looked young or innocent since Noah parked his ark. Our hair? People are certainly hair conscious. My Grandad Earp, who had cold blue eyes like his famous relations who did all that killing around Tombstone and who slept with a .38 pistol at hand, used to to say he wouldn’t pick up anyone with long hair for fear of getting robbed and killed. I have friends with long hair who are afraid to pick up shorthairs for the same reason. Baddso and I agree we had something to worry about on that score this morning with the three ding-dong bats. Not much we could have done if they’d turned mean on us from too much drink. Old Rolland had a pistol, heard him bragging about it. Something to keep the boys in line, he said, keep ‘em from that bullshit driving.
. . . . .
Cameo 1: Amarillo, eight hot, exhausting hours waiting on Route 66. The longest wait of his entire hitching career, says Baddso, who seems to have forgotten Foss Junction. On the four-lane highway traffic raced by at 70 mph but nobody stopped for us till early evening.
A young Mexican-looking guy took us 20 miles to Wildorado just beyond Amarillo. Baddso’d read the name that same day in the novel he’d brought along, The Grapes of Wrath. Sought shelter for the night amidst an endless shrilling chorus of cicadas, Baddso bedded down in a disused goods wagon. About 1a.m., Poundso joined him, to say: "I’m getting eaten alive here. Let’s go back to the roadside."
Slept the remaining hours of a hot, clammy, uncomfortable night in sleeping bags on the grass verge of the highway, with heavy goods traffic thundering by.
Cameo 2: Rolled into Albuquerque, chastened by our three-day slog. We’d spent far more hours waiting than traveling. There was a lesson to be learned here. Two swarthy guys, late 20s, unshaven and sunburned, would do well not to stand on the roadside seeking rides. Oh, we were witty, sophisticated company: a boon for any friendly driver. That we knew but perhaps it had never occurred to us we that we might look – well, to some degree, menacing.
Another thing, was that I (Baddso) had assumed that, in America, the sight of the Union Jack flag pinned to a man’s backpack would mean guaranteed rides. Who wouldn’t welcome an Englishman’s charms in the era of The Beatles, James (‘007’) Bond and Carnaby Street fashion, but it became all-too-clear that, taken together, the two of us seemed threatening. The bag with the flag, aka the pack with the jack, lost its appeal. Poundso and I would have made faster progress travelling separately, then meeting at a rendezvous point at the other end.
So it was that, tired and dusty, older and not much wiser, we staggered into Albuquerque and the hospitality of friends. Something had to give. What gave was the hitchhiking--it gave out, its place taken by hopping freight trains.
Chapter Three: Albuquerque and Out
This chapter is part of the big hole in the transcript. It has no separate text. Consequently it will contain only cameos and edifying stories. The long narrative will resume with Chapter Four.
Hopping Freights
The rest of our travel to Eugene was made by hopping freight trains. Then and now, hard to distinguish one train from another: all boxcars are dark, blackened with soot, and airless unless the big door is open on a siding. And the railway yards for freight trains have no guides for passengers, no signage to tell you where you are or how many miles to your destination. All decisions must be made on the basis of oral inquiries and faith. An eyes wide-open faith, not the Blind Faith that Clapton, Winwood, and Baker put together in 1969 out of the wreckage of supergroups Cream and Traffic.
Cameo 3
Jim Tharp and his wife Pat McNieve came next. It took three hard-going days of hitch-hiking and sleeping rough to get from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque. So we’re grateful for an R+R at Jim & Pat's place in Albuquerque. Thought to spend two nights but it turned into three. Bearded, stetson-wearing Jim a Vietnam Vet and forest ranger who dealt in rampant conflagrations he liked to call "controlled burns." Pat taught school. Both came from Topeka. We played cards in their stylish New Mexican home, drank cold beer and (one night) went to a new controversial movie called Clockwork Orange. Jim (whose father was Chief of Police for the Santa Fe railroad) put us in the right place to catch a westbound freight train in darkness. We screwed up the first time. (I recall Poundso’s plaintive cry as we loped behind the dark shape of the rear wagon: "Baddso, we've missed the fucking train!") But we succeeded on the following night.
Cameo 4
Freight train heading west, between Albuquerque & Bakersfield.
Arizona. We were sitting side by side, reading and riding in the back of a pick-up carried on a flat car--one of several flat cars loaded with cars and trucks. The evening was golden. We were facing backwards across the miles we’d covered as mesas slowly drifted by, left and right. The pick-up was one of several strapped to a Santa Fe flatbed goods wagon. A meandering, dreamy, restful, unforgettable journey in the soft light of evening. One for the annals.
Cameo 5
Freight train heading north, between Bakersfield and Oregon
As we headed north through central California on a freight, we were joined by two teenagers. They shared our cooler, placing a bottle of water inside it. Suddenly, the train lurched to a halt in the middle of nowhere, and a railroad man came ambling down the line. Poundso & I froze, lay low and remained motionless. But our co-travellers were less careful: they were seen and caught. This led to a small argument with the railroad man.
--You cain’t stay there. Git off that thing.
--Where do you want us to go?
--You can git off the train. But you git out off that thing right now.
And that’s how we lost two teenage companions and gained one bottle of water.
-------------------
An Interlude with RLS
The big news here, Gentle Reader, is that as I your narrator said a few pages earlier Chapter Two seems never to have been written, or at least there’s a big a gap in the 1972 typescript from Albuquerque until we leave Kelseyville, California on the 14th of July heading south to Lawrence, where we once again pick up significant narrative. This calls for a reformulation not just of where we’er going but of what we’re doing to get there. It’s no use staying on the trail of Poundso because that man has been dead these fifty years, and the past is a country we cannot re-enter.
We are embarked on a biographical quest following a trail (or tale) fifty years cold so let us take our exemplum from a slightly more recent quest but one for a much older subject, where the stone wall cutting off our search for the past is not just fifty years old but more than a hundred. The advantage of this shift of gears is that now the quester, whose name is Richard Holmes is a professional biographer following the famous vagabond / nomad / wanderer Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS), and Holmes has insight into the nature of biography. Was Chapter One of the present text in fact a biographical quest? Yes, for the simple reason that while the reader may suppose an identity between the Poundso of the tale and the author of the present book, the author himself feels practically none. It was another country and the wight is dead.
The situation obtains in Holmes’s work again and again, but what intrigues me at this point in my narrative is Holmes’s discovery of this as a well educated youth writing his first biography at the age of eighteen and pursuing the elusive figure of Robert Louis Stevenson, famed as the author of boys’ adventure classics like Treasure Island and Kidnapped and characterized throughout his short life (1850-1894) by a profound restlessness that kept him always on the move into new and unknown places around the globe from his birth in Scotland to his death in Samoa.
Stevens first major work of travel-adventure was his second book called Travels with a Donkey in the CĂ©vennes (1879), set in the Massif Central of France, which includes the country’s highest peaks. “Stevenson's journey lasted a mere twelve days,” writes Holmes, “but its shortness was made up for by its intensity: it was a complete pilgrimage in miniature.” He started from Le Monastier at dawn on Sunday, 22 Sept. 1878 and returned twelve days later. The last eight chapters of the Travels are largely concerned with this Camisard history, together with Stevenson's reflections on the nature of religious belief and bigotry. It presents the beginning of the "country of the Camisards", the French Protestant rebels of the regional insurrection of 1702-03, whose history had fascinated Stevenson from adolescence, when he sketched out The Pentland Rising about a similar upheaval in the eighteenth-century Scottish highlands.
This potted sketch of Stevenson is meant to aid the readers’ understanding of what it means that his Travels should be Holmes’s vade mecum. The biographer’s search for his vanished subject is greatly favored by the mountainous landscape of the French Massif Central, as the difficulty of traversing the terrain provides an objective correlative for the difficulty of the search. Here it makes perfect sense that Holmes follows Stevenson’s progress day by day and even like Stevenson has a donkey for his companion.
Stevenson reminds his readers that “in what John Bunyan calls this wilderness of the world--[we are] all, too, travellers with a donkey.” Holmes writes:
In this sense, what I experienced and recorded in the CĂ©vennes in the summer of 1964 was a haunting. Nothing of course that would make a Gothic story, or interest the Society for Psychical Research; but an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past, and in some sense the past upon the present. And in this experience of haunting I first encountered --without then realising it--what I now think of as the essential process of biography.
This is the point, gentle reader, when yours truly the writer of this narrative found several pages missing from the typescript and realized he was thrown back on his wits to mend the gap. At first it felt like a disaster, but a few hours later I amended my language to “a set back,” and anything that can be set back can also be set forward. So we’re setting the clock back to RLS and Holmes’s contemporary account. He continues:
As far as I can tell, this process [of writing biography] has two main elements, or closely entwined strands. The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man's "journey" through the world-the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the "life and letters."
In the case of a solipsistic quest like mine--the author with his 1972 typescript--looking for an earlier avatar of the self was easy, for all lay ready to hand in my early account and in my memory.
The second [continues Holmes] is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a "point of view" or an "interpretation", but a continuous living dialogue between the two as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events. There is between them a ceaseless discussion, a reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and consequences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments and conclusions. It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.
Here I had a distinct advantage over Holmes and his quest for the Stevenson of a hundred years earlier. Though I couldn’t remember the details of my journey fifty years ago, I could readily talk with the person who made that journey, who as I say is but an avatar of myself. A dusty and largely forgotten self, but he still had blood in his veins.
The first stage of such a living, fictional relationship is in my experience a degree of more or less conscious identification with the subject. More or less, because the real elements of self identification are often much more subtle and subliminal than one originally thinks. This, strictly speaking, is pre-biographic: it is a primitive form, a type of hero- or heroine-worship, which easily develops into a kind of love affair.
No, there was no hero-worship involved with my identification with my avatar--my solipsism was not of that degree--though at times I did find myself envying his energy and his toughness.
Looking back at the CĂ©vennes, [concludes Holmes,] I can now see that I went straight into that phase with Stevenson, passionately identifying with what I saw as his love of bohemian adventuring, getting out "on the road" ', and sharing with him his delight in all things French, original, eccentric. I saw him, naĂŻvely, as a direct predecessor of figures like Jack Kerouac- though the European Kerouac, the Kerouac of Lonesome Traveller, a bit lost and a bit uncertain of himself, not the roaring American romantic of On the Road. The Kerouac who, at the very end of his drunken career, comes back to France looking for his lost family roots in Brittany, searching for the Lebris de KĂ©roack in Satori in Paris.
Here I wonder if Holmes is not just describing the way any avid reader of novels identifies with the protagonist. Let’s say that in my graduate-school days I had my own love affair with Kerouac, and I wouldn’t deny it, still I have not read him as widely as Holmes has--not beyond On the Road, The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Desolation Angels, and the jazz poems of “Mexico City Blues,” and those were books I read twenty years ago. I like the way Holmes, master biographer that he is, makes us see the similarities between Stevenson’s last verses and Kerouac’s death. Holmes ends with the most famous of Stevenson’s lines:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
What all this means in my own case is something for which I must ask the readers’ tolerance: I fear it will lead to a growing ensimismamiento, to use one of my favorite Spanish words--a sinking into self-absorption--as readers recognize that in some sense the pursued and the pursuer are one and the same human being.
At the same time--and this may be the most curious turn for me personally, Stevenson’s dialogues with the protestant priesthood he finds among the old former Camisard churches, reveals at the bottom level of our traveler a depth of religious feeling we would not otherwise have expected.
It came in the morning after the priests discovered that “a Protestant heretic” was in their midst. "My kindly and admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us, and a certain Jesuitical slipperiness of speech," observed Stevenson slyly, "which I had permitted myself in my strange quarters, had probably deceived them, and it was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out." There was an immediate explosion. "Et vous prĂ©tendez mourir dans cette espèce de croyance?" burst out the priest.
Trembling with emotion and going rather white, RLS leant across the table to the parish priest: "I shall continue to answer your questions with all politeness; but I must ask you not to laugh. Your laughter seems to me misplaced; and you forget that I am describing the faith of my mother." . . . . The incident was closed, and they parted on friendly terms.
At this point in Holmes’s narrative, the reader may feel that the biographer, himself a lapsed Catholic, has completely identified with is subject.
Stevenson was probably taught something after all: for here he was hotly defending a religion, the Presbyterianism of his childhood, in which he had supposed he had no formal belief whatsoever. It led him to reflect, towards the end of his journey, on the mysterious nature of belief itself, on its profound roots in the heart and the sense of identity; and the degree to which formal creeds were inadequate to contain and express one's deepest moral convictions.
I find that I too, a man with no formal beliefs, have been caught up in the biographer Holmes’s identification with Stevenson, and I go away wondering how well I know either myself or my avatars.
Lonely, unto the lone we go;
Divine, to the Divinity.
The next subject in Holmes’ collection is also piquant, an essay called “Exiles” in which he writes about Shelley, a poet whose travels, though largely confined to Italy, are every bit as wander-ful as Stevenson’s. To get the effect, here’s the full title of the essay: “1972: Exiles.” The exile in this case is Holmes himself, who like Shelley has abandoned his native England. He is filling in the poet’s closest friends and lovers, when missing pages of the journals of Claire Claremont give him pause: “The relevant pages of journals and diaries were missing--either torn out, or lost, or subsequently destroyed.” These words also describe my own initial typescript that I have been calling the 1972 document. I use the word lacunae to describe the missing parts, but even as I type this sentence I’m filling in some of the missing pages.
As additional filler, I now present the one extended narrative that Baddso wrote. When he sent it to me a few years ago he named it “Hobo Blues” and said “Do with it what you like.” The narrative picks up the tale where it stopped abruptly in Albuquerque:
[End of RLS Interlude]
Hobo Blues [Albuquerque to Oregon]
by Baddso
In Albuquerque, well after midnight, we heard the black clanking locomotive approaching. It took the curve at a walking pace and trundled past, followed by its shadowy chain of wagons. From our hiding place in the grassy verge, Poundso pointed.
"That one!"
It was an open boxcar. I could make out its red-painted lettering in the moonlight: Santa Fe. Poundso got to his feet and, loping alongside, heaved in his backpack and clambered on board.
“C’mon!”
I swallowed hard.
Suddenly, with a crashing of buffers and piston brakes, the train shuddered to a halt. Seizing the moment, I hauled myself in, banging a knee as I dragged my pack after me. It burst open, spewing cans of Budweiser over the bevelled floor. Then, with a wrenching groan, the train clattered into motion again.
We grinned at each other. Moonbeams funneled through the open door as I rubbed my knee and Poundso gathered up the cans. Then we grinned at each other again.
We had done it. We had jumped an American freight headed for Oregon.
“It was easy!” I shouted.
Born and raised in England, I had, like every boy of my generation, been fired by tales and legends of the American railroad. Now my Oklahoman friend Poundso and I, both fresh from graduate school, were following the path of the dustbowl men: vagabonds in overalls, nomads travelling a stricken land. Oregon was our chosen goal.
We were the new knights of the silver rail: dusty, poor, cautious, but free men. Keepers of a sacred ritual, we were pilgrims on a journey to the past. And living an American adventure.
We rolled out our sleeping bags on the boxcar’s filthy floor. Poundso tried to sing Hobo Blues like John Lee Hooker but he couldn’t remember the words and he was no John Lee Hooker. So he gave up and, instead, we gazed at the neighbouring highway and the passing silhouettes and telephone poles of the State of New Mexico.
I peered at him through the darkness.
“You’re a bum,” I said.
“Don’t call me a bum.”
“You’re a railroad bum. Just thought I’d mention it.”
Then, fatigued by our daring, and lulled by the enchanted beat-beat-beat of the wheels, we surrendered to sleep.
West of Flagstaff, we peered out at the harsh daylight. The train had separated from the highway and, like a sleepwalker in trance, meandered through rock-studded desert. I hadn’t imagined that a train would ever be so slow. Did it have a schedule? Did anyone give a damn about when it would arrive? Or where it was going?
Cactus and scrub littered red dirt tracts. As I watched dead Arizona drift by, I had the delusion that I was watching an old Western film I had seen in my boyhood: men in stetsons, driving herds of cattle across boulders and dust; Indian warriors with feathered spears, galloping from the caverns of tabletop mountains; bandits, good guys, bad guys, tribesmen; riding, shooting, herding … Surely, they did it all for the cameras, and then moved on, away, faraway from this arid graveyard.
The vast tableau of the millennia possessed a terrible, seductive beauty. But who could ever yearn for such a place? What kind of life could be picked from its dust and mutilated rocks? The brooding mesas existed for themselves, as they had ever done: spectacular monuments to eons man had never known. The jagged land rolled by, forsaken by the ancient gods who had carved it.
Slipping into half-sleep, I fancied I was turning the pages of a book. In its shifting pictures, old tramps with ragged bundles tottered along rail tracks, clutching one another like invalids of war. I tried to touch their gaunt, dispirited faces. But as my fingers stretched to reach them, the pages were ripped away by the wind.
Suddenly, from nowhere – weeowwww! – two jets swept across the blue arch of the sky. We caught their wild screech a second after they hurtled to the horizon.
“We-eh!”
Poundso clung to the open doorway of the boxcar, his eyes fixed on the twin contrails spewed by the planes.
We arrived in Bakersfield in late afternoon ... We went across the SF tracks to Mexican town ... we bought a quart of California port for thirty-five cents and went to the railroad yard to drink. We found a place where hobos had drawn up crates to sit over fires. We sat there and drank the wine. On our left were the freight cars, sad and sooty red beneath the moon ...
That was Jack Kerouac, telling how it was On The Road. But no-one was passing bottles of port in Bakersfield’s yards now. The hobos were gone, one and all; gone, too, their carved symbols and all their myths and lore. In this desert of rusted tracks, Poundso and I alone had inherited their kingdom.
And where to now? How to move on? There were no timetables, no painted signs in the sprawling yards. Just locomotives – stranded futile monsters – and wagons parked in endless queues on the tangled network of the tracks.
“Stay low,” he said.
I followed his gaze. A converted Pullman car stood at the edge of the yards and, mounted on its galvanized roof, a painted sign: Dora’s Kitchen. While I guarded the backpacks, Poundso plodded his way over.
Fifteen minutes later, he returned, with company – a forty-ish man in a buttondown shirt, blue tie and rimless spectacles. He said he was a freight manager with Southern Pacific.
“This way.”
He turned and set off across the tracks with precise steps. I glanced at Poundso and, warily, all around us. Was our new companion about to deliver us up to the railroad police, as trespassers and vagrants? Hoisting our backpacks, we cautiously followed his steps till he halted at a string of Southern Pacific boxcars. They were open and sooty red, like those Kerouac had seen.
“Reckon you’ll be comfortable here.” It was a statement.
“Looks good,” Poundso said.
“Train leaves two-fifteen, two-thirty. For Stockton and Eugene.”
“Sounds good.”
Poundso thanked the man and they shook hands. Still hovering between courtesy and suspicion, I held back and nodded. As he turned to leave, the man paused.
“You take care at Stockton. Railroad bull there, he got a reputation. Shoots first, asks questions later, know what I mean?"
Then, with his careful steps, our rail company ally picked his way back to the lunchwagon.
At Stockton, the train waited a long, long time. We lay low, perspiring, taking occasional sips of tepid water from our canisters. Ahead of us, the town dogs howled endlessly, too stunned by the heat to move. Poundso hunched in a corner, reading his Whitman, I tried to read Kerouac, but it was hopeless. I could think only of the bull with the gun and willed the train to fire up and pull us to safety.
The dreadful moment arrived: the crunch-crunch-crunch of a man approaching from the back end of the train. The slowness of the steps, the deliberate pace …
Poundso and I froze, pressing our backs to the doorside wall, not daring to breathe.
The man stopped and, for a long agonizing minute, stood by the doorway, motionless and silent. Then he leaned in and laid a sheaf of papers on the floor we were standing on. Rock-still, our fingertips pressed hard against the metal wall, we could see his hands and forearms working on the papers.
I was ready to scream lest he should slide the door shut in a single sweep, lock it, and leave us to die while the hounds of Stockton whined their mournful dirge. Or would he take his gun and shoot us both, to hear the death rattle in the throats of the last hobos? They was the both of ‘em in that wagon, and screamin‘ fit to bust! They was angry, I tell you. Theyda killed me, I know it! I had no choice. I had to …
Abruptly, the man gathered up his papers and moved on.
Hell is an empty boxcar, hurled and tossed in stygian space. For hour after black hour, we were flung and thrown, clinging to the stanchions, unable to sit or lie on the ribbed metal floor. Not a sliver of light pierced our steel prison. We were invisible, faceless railroad hobos trapped in crashing din, grasping to stay alive, while the mad, clattering, empty train swung, bounded and leapt its way to northern California.
The long miserable night forced on me the lunacy of our quest. What on earth had led us to this? The hobos were long gone: grown old before their time, and mouldered now, forgotten, interred by lost barren trails. And we – exhausted, crushed, our tongues caked with dust – we were deluded fools, in search of a wasted dream.
Daybreak found us grinding up a slope in the Sacramento Valley. Wheels screamed against the flange on long bends, weeping to the labour of the train.
Gripping the doorframe, I stared at the crumbling white hills and the avalanched rock piled at the edge of the track. Pine trees massed the slopes like sentries, their trunks scarred by windborne dust.
Poundso joined me at the doorway, his face lizard-thin after the desolate hours of the night.
“This sucks.”
We yearned for a cold beer, bed and, more than anything, a rich cleansing shower. The filth of seven hundred miles had seeped into the boxcar during our ordeal. Dirt clogged our pores and nostrils. Grime matted the hair, clung to the throat and lined the sockets of our eyes.
Life, it has been famously claimed, is a daring adventure or it is nothing. But for the two of us, wretched and drained, the last hobos, out of time, and choking on the sterile dust of the past, all urge for adventure had fled.
Suddenly, we lurched to a halt. Anesthetized to the grinding of steel and the boxcar’s clank and sway, we were stupefied by the sudden quiet. Gradually, though, we attuned to the new acoustics: birdsong, squawking crows, the shifting of breeze in high trees.
Poundso sat listening, intent, his hand raised.
“What’s up?” I whispered.
Then I heard them too, beneath the rustling of the woods. Voices. Men’s voices: distant, low, contained. Quite which direction they were coming from was hard to say. But we were not alone.
A shaft of fear, worse than the Fresno fear, coursed down my spine and shook my bladder. We were not alone. Men – how many men? – had stopped the train in the woods and were searching the wagons. Whether railroad men or bandits seeking loot and plunder: they would kill us. We were two unarmed guys on an empty train, and men had come out of the woods to kill us and take all we had.
“Stay cool.”
Poundso studied the floor, intent, quizzical. The voices were low-key, unhurried. It was hard to make them out or to say how many there were.
Suddenly, he looked up, his eyebrows raised. We realised it at the same moment: the men were not coming closer. They weren’t even moving. Relief weakened me almost to urination point.
Poundso inched his way to the door and peered out.
“God – damn … ”
I hesitated, then tip-toed over to join him.
We were on the curve of a forested valley. The ends of the train, front and back, were out of sight, hidden in woodland. Before us and below, thousands upon thousands of ponderosa and lodgepole pine ranged to the horizon and beyond, far, faraway to the summer sky. And we saw the men. About twenty of them.
They had climbed off the train and were spread along the grass at the side of the track, amid clumps of lupines and blue huckleberry. An army of vagabonds, in pairs and clusters, they were chatting, unwrapping bread from greaseproof, and drawing tobacco from battered leather pouches. From somewhere drifted the uneven strum of a guitar and a gust of laughter.
The two men we had heard were maybe thirty-five, in frayed lumberjack shirts. They had got off the flatbed ahead of us and were sitting and smoking now, gazing at the panorama of the endless green valley. One of them turned his head and nodded as we stepped down to the grass.
A man in red railman’s overalls came shambling down the sunlit verge, swinging a short wrench. In a thin station-announcer’s voice, he broadcast news as he passed.
“Freight loadin’ up the line. Be here forty, maybe fifty minutes.”
We turned to each other, thinking the same thought.
“We were not alone,” he said. “Just thought I’d mention it.”
Grinning, he shook his head and tugged the peak of his straw hat against the sun. Then he joined the two men nearby. They greeted him and talked quietly, one of them scratching his chin as he spoke.
Poundso turned and called.
“Hey, we’re in Oregon!”
Oregon … ? We had done it.
The smoky haze of the brooding forest, the glimpsed ghosts of desolate, huddled men, rolling thin cigarettes beneath the moon. Remnants of fear no longer clutched at our bowels-- we were brother riders of the rail, weary and poor, sharing the rigors of the miles. We had lived an adventure only available to the poor, reached our goal, and we were free men. No money in our pockets but free, all free men.
Sometimes we have to get some outside help from the Higher Power. Call it luck or whatever.
……………….
Poundso calls it The Peaceable Kingdom
The vision came to him at dawn one morning when the freight train they’d been riding all day was making its slow way up a long mountain grade and stopped, in that peaceful way that freight trains have of tolerating each other, pulling off into a siding in order to allow the passage of a faster train or one bound in the opposite direction. Great monsters of fire and iron though they be, even a freight train has moments of peace. Some of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems take their images from trains, like the one beginning “I like to see it lap the miles,” which ends
Then - prompter than a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At it's own stable door -
The early nineteenth-century painter Edward Hicks was a Quaker minister best remembered today for the 62 versions
The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks
of The Peaceable Kingdom which he painted. Hicks' work was influenced by a specific Quaker belief referred to as the Inner Light. George Fox and other founding Quakers had established and preached the Inner Light doctrine, yielding one's self-will to the divine power of Christ and the "Christ within." Hicks depicted humans and animals to represent the Inner Light's breaking physical barriers of difference between individuals and species, allowing them to work and live together in peace. Many of his paintings further exemplify this concept with depictions of Native Americans meeting the settlers of Pennsylvania, with William Penn prominent among them. Looking through the boxcar door, we lacked Puritans and Indians but we had everything else.
My little boxcar epiphany was one that Hicks would have liked. Though Baddso and I agreed that riding a box car was hellish, the same boxcar could stop for a moment on a mountain siding and open its great door to paradise. The deer were the dominant creatures in this vision
Such visionary moments can appear anywhere, through the open door of a boxcar hell or in the pages of a crime novel by Tony Hillerman like The Dance Hall of the Dead, where a white girl remembers a hunting prayer spoken by her Zuñi boyfriend to a dying deer:
And then there's a prayer when the deer falls. You take his muzzle in your hands and you put your face against his nostrils and you inhale his breath, and you say, 'Thank you, my father. This day I have drunken in the sacred wind of your life.’”
Cameo 6
“Hobo Blues” strays from the truth in a few minor details. For example, Poundso didn’t sing – or try to sing “Hobo Blues.” And then the reference to Union Pacific or Southern Pacific, not sure which of them is correct.
But there‘s one point where to keep events in the right sequence truth was deliberately abandoned. The shoot-first railroad bull was not in Fresno, California, but in Winslow, Arizona.
Arrival in Kelseyville
This section has to begin nowhere because neither Baddso nor Poundso remembers how they got there. In Eugene, Baddso had attended the track meet three days or so, and Poundso had gone to a Shakespeare festival in Ashland. They knew they were going from Eugene to Kelseyville but neither remembers where they met up to continue their journey. What they do remember is arriving in Kelseyville: They had been hitchhiking, and their last ride let them off at the Kelsey Creek Bridge about midnight. Poundso knew the territory, for as a boy in the mid 1950s this had been part of the route the school bus took and he had often walked it. He knew his aunt and uncle lived a few miles south on the unpaved road that took off from the bridge in that direction.
Two backpacking tramps in earnest conversation
on the bridge at midnight soon attracted the attention of the police, for even a small town (population 1500) has a police patrol at night. A decent kind of small town cop gave us the usual ID check and I quickly explained that we were on our way to visit my uncle Melvin Pounds who lived a couple of miles south of here but I didn’t know how to get there and even if we had a phone it’d be too late to call. Oh Melvin Pounds, of course he knew Melvin Pounds-- just like he knew all the other decent citizens of Kelseyville, and he volunteered to take us out there, suggesting that since we had sleeping bags we could just sleep in the yard. Said he’d give Melvin a call early in the morning to let him know he had campers. That sounded good to us, so he took us out there. Uncle Melvin and Aunt Hazel would have been expecting us, they just didn’t know when. Anyway we could see well enough to find a place to spread our bedrolls and so good-night sweet prince good-night. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Mr. Policeman must have called in our arrival about six, because when Uncle Melvin came outdoors, he wasn’t surprised to see us, and by the time we gathered our gear Aunt Hazel was making pancakes. We just happened to arrive the weekend that my cousin Sharon was celebrating her marriage, my memory of which preserves no detail. The groom was a fellow with a lot of money, his parents owned a Great Gatsby type house that wowed Baddso, but I wonder how long the marriage would last. Sharon’s twin sister Karen married only once, and it lasted a lifetime. In that the instance of marriage, their lives were different. Beautiful black-haired girls--Aunt Hazel had a touch of Oklahoma Indian blood--they usually stayed in step (and many years later would even die a year apart of the same disease).
Cameo no. 7
Kelseyville, California
Your easy pipe-smoking Uncle Melvin and talkative Aunt Hazel in Kelseyville. She prattled on, giving him driving instructions. He blithely ignored them all, smoking his pipe, a picture of ease and contentment.
Aunt Hazel’s Tale
Hazel [speaking to Poundso]: Your mother called me and said she was in labor, wanted me to come over, so I came over. Yeah I caught a taxi. Wasn't too long then till we called Dr. Smith and he came along toward evenin.
Yeah, I helped bring you into this world. I remember your birthday's April 2nd, isn't it? I'll never forget that part. I was Johnny at the rat hole.
Yeah [laughs], I remember. Your daddy would get so engrossed in your mother's pain that he'd forget what he was supposed to be doin. Dr. Smith, he'd say "Archie!" and Archie'd come out of his daze. He was supposed to be holdin your mother's knee. And I was holdin the other knee. She was delivered at home. She wasn't in the stirrups and all that stuff they put you through in the hospital. And Archie would get so carried away with concern about your mother's plight that he'd forget and not do what he was supposed to. Dr. Smith would have to bring him out of his trance.
I remember when I got in the cab and come back home after you were born, Wayne. You know, after watchin your mother. I remember walkin in--Melvin and I was livin in that little two-room house back behind Grandpa and Grandma Pounds's--and I think it was gettin on toward daylight by then. Melvin was layin on the bed and he had Melba holdin her up in the air over him playin with her. She was less than two years old. I remember walkin in and sayin to Melvin, "Oh my Lord, I think I'd just die if I had to go through that again."
None of my kids were delivered at home. I almost died with Debbie, and after that they was all born in the hospital.
. . . . .
Poundso: Who came out here to California first. Was that your family, Aunt Hazel--the Suttons?
Hazel: Yes, my folks run back and forth to California. They first came to California in 1923. They went down around Los Angeles, Whittier, down in there. Daddy went right to work drillin oil wells. Mamma let him land down there for ten whole days, and then we were on our way back to Oklahoma. She cried day and night, so Daddy just quit his job and back to Oklahoma we went. That was 'long about the time The Grapes of Wrath come out, and Oklahomans were just about as welcome as a bad case of the itch. Mama just couldn't take that--crap that we had to put up with.
Poundso: Surely not in 1923, Aunt Hazel. That's a little early for The Grapes of Wrath. Though the feeling you mention may already have been here.
Melvin: Oh, it was. It was even here in '46 when we came here. They just referred to you as trash.
Hazel: You know your Uncle Earl [laughs] hadn't been here very long and he was a goin down the street over here from the dairy in town. It was a Sunday afternoon and I can still show you the house--we knowed the people real well. They were all havin an ice cream social on the front porch of the house. Earl went by and somebody threw up their hand and hollered, "Hi Okie." Didn't mean a darn thing in the world about it, I don't suppose. ol' Earl he just put his ol' Pontiac in reverse, and he backed up. He stepped out of the car, and he said, "I can whip the s.o.b. that said that." He didn't have any takers.
Poundso: Did you ever have any trouble that way, Uncle Melvin?
Hazel: No.
Melvin: Yeah, I told some of 'em if they called me an Okie they'd better be smilin [laughs].
Hazel: Yeah, I've told a few of 'em that too. I said, "I don't object to be called Okie as long as it's in a jokin way, but you want to make sure you're smilin when you say that or be prepared to whip my fanny.
Melvin: I've been ribbed a lot about bein from Oklahoma.
Hazel: Well Pete Leuzinger who was from Switzerland--I guess Melvin said something one time or the other to him about bein called an Okie, and Pete told him "you got the wrong slant on that." People here in Lake County call anybody that, you know, is a little trashy or something. They were Okies, whether they was from Oklahoma or not. It all started with the dust-bowl days.
Melvin: Pete said most of the Okies were native Californians.
Poundso: Sure. A hundred years ago weren't any white folks here, where there?
Hazel: Yeah, Lake County itself is over two hundred years old. I've read the history on it. Two hundred years ago there wasn't a pear tree in Lake County, they was all grapes, and there was lots of grapes, and there was lots of grape wineries. They deteriorated, and everybody went to pears. Now they're all pullin out the pears and goin back to grapes.
Poundso: What kind of work was here when you came in '46?
Melvin: Walnuts, pears...
Hazel: Prunes, dairyin , lumber, tourists. When we came out Debbie was seven and Melba Ray was seventeen months old. We worked for Pete Leuzinger. Grandma Pounds worked for the Bensons. They were pear growers. In fact, Alita Benson has got a book on Lake County history. She gave me an autographed copy, and like an idiot I loaned it to someone, never could remember who I loaned it to, and never did get it back.
. . . . .
Dancing
Hazel: Your Daddy liked to dance, Wayne. Oh, you betcha. He and Sarah danced all the time. But Melvin didn't learn to dance until Debbie was in high school. We sat up one whole night teachin him how to dance. Then the very next Saturday night we went to a dance and he danced up a storm.
No, he wasn't a very quick learner, not if we had to stay up all night to teach him. You ought to have seen that. It was right down here on Church Street, when Debbie was about 14 or 15. The kids had a little ol' record player. Right out of a clear blue sky, he said, "Hurry up and get the dishes done," and we wondered why in the world he was in such a hurry to get the dishes done. Then he had Debbie help him, they moved the table. Moved it over in one corner of the house, and he said, "Now you guys are goin to teach me how to dance if we have to stay up all night." What made it nice was Debbie and Melba could dance together, the twins could dance together, and Papa and I could dance together. Well we started out tryin to dance that a way. Debbie'd say now Daddy you do this, you do that, you know. Well that didn't work. So we all got in a line, like a bunch of ducks. She got in line first, and her daddy got right behind her. And she said, "Now put your hands on my hips, and you move your feet just like I move mine." We went around and around the room that a way, and finally he got the gist of how to do that. Then we coupled up, and I'd dance with him, or Debbie'd dance with him. I'm not lyin to you, Wayne, that went on all night. Because the next Saturday--
We were havin little neighborhood dances. We weren't goin out so much. No, I can't say that because we rented the Veterans' hall down here for our big parties. But we knew that there was gonna be a little dance the next Saturday night. I was workin at the hospital, and I didn't get off till eleven o'clock. When I got to the dance, I went down there in my nurses's uniform and joined the dance because I knew it wasn't goin to last much longer, boy here your Uncle Melvin was, he was swingin them right and left! It was all our neighbors and their wives. He was about half snockered. We had a lot of fun.
Cousin Andy
Uncle Hank said Andy started drinkin because of the paint fumes, to get the taste out of his mouth after he worked all day. Uncle Hank and I did a lot of talkin, back and forth when we'd go shoppin. He had his own ideas about why Andy drank.
Now when we first landed in California and we learned where Bend Oregon was, Melvin had me write and ask Andy about directions. Sometime when we had some time off we'd drive up and see 'em. Melvin was very hurt and offended to think that they didn't even answer our letter. Uncle Hank said it was because Andy was so far into drink they didn't want us to know.
Years later I wrote him and he answered. This was when he was already divorced and livin in Ada.
Bessie and Earl
Hazel: We were out here, and Bessie and Earl were the last people on earth that we expected to come to Lake County. We were just shocked. I don't know whether Earl still had his job there at Tulsa, but the next thing we knew they had sold out lock, stock, and barrel. I remember it was in April, and when they come out they had Grandma and Grandpa Pounds with them. We thought of it you know as bein a visit. I don't remember how long Grandma and Grandpa Pounds stayed. That would have been April of '47, and they moved up on the Benson ranch. They lived in a cabin--later on Grandma and Grandpa Pounds lived in the same cabin. I guess they all moved up there together, the four of them and lived together. I don't think they'd ever have come to California if we hadn't been here. They were lookin for new horizons, I guess. Anyway, they were very very happy here. They liked the climate. They went back to Oklahoma quite often, but I don't remember' em ever sayin that they wished they hadn't a come to California. Because they seemed to be perfectly content here. Then they bought the dairy and your dad worked with them for quite a long while when they were out here. Then Bessie and Earl sold the dairy, and there on that strip of property where Bessie and Earl now live--it was an old prune orchard. Aunt Bessie bought that. And when I say Aunt Bessie I do mean Aunt Bessie. Earl didn't have a bloomin thing to do with it. She was the manager. Just like Carol remarked to me before the funeral, her and Verdon don't call Earl "Earl" they call him E.A. She said, "E.A. as far as I know has never even written a check. Bessie took care of all that."
E. A. stands for Earl Amon Strong, and there's another story behind that. Boy I tell you he hated that name. One day Bessie and I was just jokin--I'd asked him what that A stood for and he told me--and Bessie and I got to gigglin, and he got so dadburned mad. To turn it into a joke we told him if he didn't shut up we was gonna pants him. They lived then out there on the dairy and we lived in Finley. And he dared us. So I motioned to Bessie and I said, "Let's just show the old boy we can pants him." We threw him down in the floor--he had on overalls--and Bessie she got up astraddle of him. Lord only knows where I had him. We had his suspenders unfastened and about that time LaDon walked in the door. She was just a young girl, but she was strong as a bull. And of all things here all three of us was down in the floor takin that man's pants off when there was a knock on the door, and somebody just thoughtlessly hollered "Come in!" And who was it but the insurance man! And here us women was, had this big ol' man in the floor takin his pants off.
But Bessie bought that prune orchard. There must have been a good--I'm afraid to say twenty acres. I'm not very good on acres. Ten or fifteen, but it took in the house that was the boardin home. Well it went down that road far enough that my baby brother J.P. and his wife--I don't know just how much land they bought off of Bessie. But she sold that off, she broke it up. At that time you could break it up in smaller parcels than you can now. But she broke that up in these small parcels, and she sold it to people--like my brother and his wife. Anyhow Bessie worked out a deal with them where they paid on it over ten or fifteen years.
Bessie was clever enough that she collected this interest. That's the way she sold all that off--at a low down, low monthly, to get the interest. Aunt Bessie was a manager. She wasn't a person for a lot of style, a lot of class. She was just a down-to-earth ol' country girl, and she enjoyed makin a buck. She really did. And she absolutely deprived herself of a lot of the luxuries she could have enjoyed, but that wasn't her style. She wanted security. She wanted to know it was there. She wasn't a woman to put a lot of money in clothes, furniture, you know, showin off, tryin to catch up--that just wasn't her style. I said to Melvin the other day, "You know Melvin if your sister had a-had--she didn't even have a high school education. If your sister had a-had just a business-college education, you know Bessie would a been a multi-millionaire. It wouldn't surprise me a bit." It was amazin what she knew. I don't know where she learned it, how she got it. She was just gifted in that way. And she had a heart in her as big as all outdoors.
Poundso: She taught herself a lot, I guess. She told me she wanted to go to high school, but to do that she would have had to leave home and Grandpa wouldn't allow it.
Hazel: Well, you didn't disobey your dad. He was the man of the house and he was law, you know. Just like Melvin droppin out of high school. Now I think Melvin may have built up a little resentment there, because he was the oldest and his folks was desperate, didn't know how they was gonna put in their crop. So Melvin he ups and goes into the CC camp to make it easier for his Dad that particular year. He wanted to play football so badly. But to play football you had to stay after school, and here they were something like four and a half miles. He couldn't stay for football practice and get home in time to help with the chores, so that was nixed, you know. Course I don't think Melvin was overly fond of school anyway.
Games and Sports
Melvin: I didn't like dominoes as well as I did bridge.
Hazel: I can't imagine Melvin playin bridge.
Melvin: A good game. . . . But horseshoes was my best game. I could beat all of 'em put together.
Hazel: He was pretty salty, believe you me. When we lived out here in the country he had me come out one time and keep score, and out of a hundred pitches-- I forget how many ringers it was he strung.
Melvin: I used to throw about eighty percent.
Hazel: Every year they have a big horseshoe tournament down at Santa Rosa, and he had thought seriously about gettin into it. That's why he had me out keepin score for him. He used to take our son-in-laws out there, and he'd pitch all three of 'em. Just him against all three of 'em. Isn't that the way you did it?
Melvin: Yeah. They never did beat me either. I'd even give'm five for a ringer, and for me it was only three; and for them leaners was three, and close ones was one, and I didn't count anything for myself but ringers [laughs]. I didn't have any problem beatin 'em.
Hazel: I think that was one reason Melvin was such a good bowler, pitchin all those horseshoes.
Melvin: It's all part of the same thing.
Hazel: Honey, did you pitch horseshoes right-handed or left-handed?
Melvin: Right.
Hazel: It's funny how Melvin eats right-handed, he writes right-handed, he chops wood left-handed . . . . Did you play baseball right-handed?
Melvin: Batted baseball left-handed. I threw the ball right-handed.
Hazel: He golfs left-handed.
Poundso: Where did you play baseball?
Hazel: Mostly out here.
Melvin: Used to play at Oak Grove all the time every summer.
Hazel: He played a lot of ball here in Lake County.
Poundso: I've heard a lot of stories about good ball players around Oak Grove, but in other stories it sounds like you guys never had a baseball, so I've never gotten this straight.
Melvin: No, we couldn't afford a baseball or a good glove or anything.
Hazel: Probably you couldn't afford the time. Sunday afternoon, or was it a Saturday afternoon thing?
Melvin: It was Sunday afternoon when we played baseball.
Churches and Religion
Hazel: Well I'll bet your mother never went, did she?
Melvin: No, but Dad...
Hazel: Because that's the thing I can't understand about religion. The very same churches out here in California, your Nazarenes and all them that were all so straight laced in Oklahoma, now no way were they gonna sit down and watch a baseball game on Sunday afternoon. Now it was alright if you wanted to watch it on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday or Saturday, but you just didn't do it on Sunday. Even when it was your own kids playin.
But out here the minister is just as gungho on Sunday football, if it's football season, or baseball. Sure, they get up and go to church on Sunday mornin, but on Sunday afternoon they want to know how that ball game's a goin. It's like your Mother said to me: "Why didn't they have Bessie's funeral on Sunday?" I said, "Opal, they don't have funerals in California on Sunday."
Poundso: Aunt Bessie told me her father was a religious man. I never realized that. She said if he didn't go to church it was because every time he went down there they preached at him about smoking cigarettes.
Melvin: Yeah.
Hazel: That was poor ol' Grandpa Pounds's alibi. Now he did have his church, and he told her if she'd go to church with him he'd go to church with her. But she wouldn't go to his church, so he wouldn't go to hers.
Poundso: But wasn't that late in his life he found that church to go to? I remember for along time he didn't go at all. He'd stay home Sunday morning and read the Bible. What do you think, Uncle Melvin? Was your father a religious man?
Melvin: Well, to an extent, yes. When we were kids he went...
Hazel: Oh yeah, he was goin to church when Melvin and I got married.
Melvin: He'd go to Sunday School and church every Sunday evenin.
December 7, 1941
Hazel: December 7, 1941. It was a Sunday, and we were out to your Grandpa and Grandma Pounds's on the farm. We knew nothin, absolutely, about it till Monday mornin. Melvin had gone to work. He went to work at the old Taylor honey plant, where he and Earl worked there in Chandler. I already had my ironin board up and was ironin. I was one of those people that when I got out of bed the radio was turned on and it wasn't turned off until I went to bed that night. But that Sunday we was out to Tom and Roxy's and they didn't even have a radio.
The first thing I heard when I turned the radio on Monday mornin--the first words that I heard was, "I now declahh a state of wahh on the Japanese Empaihh." It was ol' Roosevelt. That was the way he talked. I thought, "What am I hearin!" I called Gladys Freeman and said, "Lord, what will we do? Melvin's goin to have to go to war." It scared the shit out of me.
-----------------
Goodnight Uncle Melvin
No longer remember exactly what the date was I said goodbye to Uncle Melvin, only that Aunt Hazel had me carry him into the bedroom and put him on his bed. How little he weighed, no more than a boy of twelve. Like to think I said a little prayer for him: “Goodnight sweet Uncle, and flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.”
Chapter Four: From California Back to Kansas
Dunno what Uncle Melvin said when he came into the bedroom but I agreed with him and then for a delirious moment considered lying in bed a bit longer, but the specter of over sleep after two weeks’ riding Baddso for being so coldblooded in the mornings frightened me onto my feet and into the bathroom. Scraping a razor around my face, hoping for bacon and eggs like the morning we arrived here and woke up in the yard but when I got into the kitchen and said Good Morning Aunt Hazel I was greeted by the sight of oatmeal. Didn’t want to seem unappreciative but wasn’t ready for the idea of feeding oatmeal--oatmeal is for invalids!--to hungry travelers who weren’t going to get another hand-fondled love-seasoned meal in God’s own trackless time but there was coffee in abundance and buttered toast so I summed up gratitude and mouthed and worked my way to the bottom of the bowl, eating it as though it were the French toast she made for me when I came as a kid twenty years ago and had never eaten French toast before and she made it for me with different kinds of jam and honey and smiled to see me devour it because by this point in my youthful delinquency I’d long ago seen to it that the popular belief was that I didn’t like to eat. Aunt Hazel the wise old aunt never bought that story saying he’ll eat when he gets hungry and she was right--I got hungry in basic training in the Army and had been blessed with good appetite ever since though come to think of it I hadn’t seen her since my transformation. In the midst of which Baddso came in effusing verbal amenities as usual. Uncle Melvin was not a breakfast-eater so Aunt Hazel packed him a lunch, their usual routine. Goodbye hug to Aunt Hazel the distillation of good will with some fat added to hold her to the terrestrial, fond words, packs in the back of the pickup, and two miles down Big Valley Road named like a TV western to the intersection of Highway 29 which would get us to Lower Lake. Uncle Melvin got out of the pickup as we pulled our packs out of the back, stuck out his hand and I gave him mine saying it had been good to be there and all the etceteras but he was saying something that must have meant goodbye and I had the feeling he didn’t hear me. Goodbye from Melvin to Baddso gratitude’s mouthpiece and the Emily Post of good manners and Uncle Melvin’s truck was out of sight. Baddso and I stood by Highway 29 looking at each other, silently saying well let’s get some traffic stopped but I’m not ready to return to Kansas. Barbara is asleep, her mattress on the floor, and it’s been days since I wrote her a postcard. It’s 7 o’clock in the morning.
Three quarters of an hour later we’re still standing there and I’m wondering whether Baddso and I are going to be able to het a ride out of here. Hard to think we make such a gruesome duo but certainly both of us traveled alone about this part of the country quite freely and here we are now together again and going no place. I examine a nearby culvert for a place to hid should we decide to go one at a time and then meet up in Reno, train riding country. (No trains in Lake County.) Then an empty dump truck pulls up to the intersection from Big Valley Road and stops, the kind of situation in which I like to really lay the pleaful gaze on the driver while he’s stopped and looking both ways with nothing to think about but the sight of a fellow critter’s begging eyes. I remember the hound Beauregard’s mournful soul-eyed routine in the Pogo strips, guaranteed to wring hearts as he renders “Old Dog Trey.” I give the driver the Beauregard peepers and he considers a moment than waves us to get in. The personal touch was the kicker. Look into their orbs with your own doggy brown ones. Shameless but often effective. Born in the Year of the Dog, it comes easily to me.
The truck’s only going thirteen miles down the road, four short of Lower Lake. The driver assures us that were he’s dropping us is a good spot to hitch from, a thing drivers often say when’re going to let you off in Shit City or the middle of the Mojave. Sure enough, coming down a mountain he turns off and I’ve got a presentiment of some waiting but as we’re getting out we see a car coming and we get our thumbs out high and urgent like old glory in the wind and stop him. This
guy drives a pickup and takes us in the cab to Lower Lake and the intersection of Highways 29 and 53.
We’re there thirty minutes, long enough for me to walk down the opposite direction and read the road sign which says Vallejo and Middletown. Don’t want to go there so we must be going the right direction. Walking back to where Baddso stands I stop to read a monument, says Lower Lake “formally Grantsville, founded in 1849.” Hmmmm. So the Sisterhood for Roadside Edification that erected this item in the great chain of unending highway markers is saying that LowerLake is a misnomer, popular but inaccurate or did “formally” get into the “formerly” slot of their California Heritage Dictionary. The Kelseyville monument by the bridge outside Kelseyville has the blunt factuality of a gazetteer but omits to mention that John Kelsey and his cohorts killed and enslaved many local Indians to build their fine adobe homes. That’s accurate--formally, that is. Ashamed of Kelsey’s depredations, which extended to massacres. The local citizens from time to time petition to change the name of the town to Konocti after the tallest local mountain, but I see that nothing has been done in the seventeen years of my absence and likely never will be. This is how the west was won:
The cavalry charged and the Indians died
Oh the country was young then with God on its side
--Bob Dylan
A longhaired twenty-one year old in a 1951 Chevy pickup with a jazzed up interior stops for us. Every ashtray, sun visor, and spot of bare dash between the instruments is either a psychedelic potluck labyrinth or bears a pious poster coming out strong the for perpetuation of mother earth. He means well but says little and gets us seven miles down the road to the apocalyptic hallelujah trail, Highway 20, the road both Barry and I came in on and the road I’m thinking we’ll follow for a couple hundred miles to Emigrant Gap and I-80 on its way to Reno.
Pretty quick we’ve got a ride with a kid looks to be maybe seventeen in a fairly new but very ragged Mercury station wagon. He doesn’t cut his hair, which is long and blonde, and the hair on his chin, which is short and blonde, glinting in the light, has never needed. If he avoids wine he’s got the three qualifications of a Nazarite and can expect to pull down the stadium of the Philistines or give out the hot skinny on the end of the world to captive witches while hauling them over the mountains from Williams (Colusa Co.) to Lower Lake. He’s got a front seat full of audio tapes and earphones, private listening equipment which he politely turns off as we get in. On his way to Eugene Oregon to pick up his sisters. Well well well we say in our best voices of polite astonishment and I go ahead and make the predictable response. You can’t guess where we’ve been . . . but he’s not interested to learn that we’re coming from Eugene. Since our friendship has now been cemented by twenty miles of travel he wants to know if we have any grass. Nope, we’re clean. Too many altercations with the cops for no reason to go around with a good reason for them to lock you up. For possession aggravated by itinerancy they salt you away in the woodshed until any number of hot summers is past and flown away with the dickey birds.
The kid’s going up I-5 to Eugene, which puts us out near Williams. Try for a ride on Highway 20 for a while with no results. Baddso trying to convince me to take I-5, which is very conveniently running underneath us a river full of traffic. Almost no traffic on 20 going our way but the problem with I-5 is that it means going out of our way to Sacramento making two legs of a triangle instead of going straight across on the third. Also it means going south and we don’t want to go south, too much like back-tracking. We want to go north and besides it’s against the law, in violation of our benefactor the law which protects good citizens like ourselves from roadbums and foreigners, that hitch on a California freeway.
Five more minutes watching the cars coming down 20 turning off on I-5 before they get to where we are, and I vote for I-5.
A Ride with Navy Joe
We no sooner get down the ramp onto the freeway than a white Ford van with overwide back wheels, the kind you see on drag machines only not slicks, with big white lettering which doesn’t say Firestone on the sides but Hot Daddies, pulls up and is stopped before he even gets to us.
When a car does that it means it has decided to pick you up no matter how you look, which I don’t much like since I’d rather think we were being stopped for our visible merits, such as they are, such as they are, the Jack on a pack and my straw hat. We’re walking forward when the driver yells to us to hurry “before this thing heats up” so we jog packs into the van through the side door which somehow closes behind us and we take off. The driver a slender guy my age with curly uncombed black hair down the back of his neck and wearing a T-shirt. Looks like a mechanic who has just finished a four year stretch in the Navy. Thee’s a fourteen year old boy sitting in the righthand seat and a chick sitting on the cowl over the engine. Have to say “chick” here because if I use the more common “girl” that puts her in the same class as the “boy” and she’s not fourteen by at least six years. Steer away from the semantic chaos of gender. She’s sitting on some carpeting, as I first thought for padding but as I soon learned to preserve her soft butt from baking over the engine heat. In addition to this triplet, who have the only seats in the van, there are two brothers, hitchers like ourselves in their mid and late teens, and a chick with a four year old boy. She smiles and is suddenly pretty. Evidently these two belong with the triplet in front and all are bound for L.A. by way of Sacramento. Providing the engine stays cool, which it doesn’t. Watch that door and don’t lean against it, comes the sudden word from Navy Joe at the wheel, it’ll fly open. A very tricky door indeed it turns out to be and takes ten minutes to fasten every time it’s opened.
After picking up Baddso and me the van stops for water at the next gas station. In what appears to be a practiced routine, Navy Joe pulls up to the water hose, the kid jumps out to hand him the hose, the girl takes her carpet and moves to the rear, Navy Joe opens the cowl, the engine running, takes the proffered waters hose through the window and begins hosing down the radiator, shooting the water into the fan, causing a spray towards the passengers. With the cowl up and the van stopped the heat in the engine quickly passes the melting point of flesh and we deliquesce as we get out the door, forming puddles of liquid flesh on the concrete drive where we stand.
Navy Joe gets Maybellene cooled down to his satisfaction, radiator filled, and as we all clamber in and he takes off he tells Baddso and me that such stops are necessary only every hundred miles or so.
rainwater running over my hood
I knew that was doin’ my motor good
In five miles the motor is overheating again and we hit another station. This is Williams, and Navy Joe gets the idea of buying a thermostat and installing it. This requires driving around town to find an automotive parts shop, where we all stand around on the sidewalk soaking up the hundred and twelve degree heat while Navy J makes the purchase. The women and the four year old find shade in the entrance of a restaurant and I wonder how long it will be before the proprietor shoos them off as hindrances to trade and profit or calls the police. Baddso is walking up and down the sidewalk peering into windows. He disappears only to show up a minute laster with three oranges, just three because we’re at a little distance from the van with its passengers and he offers me one, telling me he had brought them from the same grocery store where he bought oranges for lunch on his way to Kelseyville from Oregon. He seems almost happy to be in such familiar territory . I accept the orange figuring that the third one will be offered for division to the others but Baddso goes on across the street digging the pulp out of the skin with his teeth like a steam scoop shovel getting mud out of a hole. Unlike him to forget the amenities. I take my peeled orange up to the restaurant entrance and offer slices around in a facetious way calculated to serve as an apology for all my sins against courtesy. Only the four year old accepts. He can’t get enough.
The fourteen year old and Navy Joe are tying to get the radiator hose disconnected from the engine block in order to put in the thermostat but the engine is so hot that the bolts and surrounding portions of the block are frying their fingers. I offer my small assistance but Navy Joe says he might as well do it himself because his fingers are already french fried. My grand piano sits blanketed on Connecticut Street and I agree, secretly relieved and twinging with guilt at being let off easy and being so cautious of my fingers. Rubinstein’s Friday Afternoon piano concert’s now on the road to Kansas and home: please do not bring guests and for that matter do not come yourself.
The bubbling rust-covered water has finished running out of the finally disconnected hose anded I hold the hose away from the block with the aid of a wet paper towel. Surprising how how rubber can be. It’s as criminal for a grand piano like mine to set with no one playing as it is for it to be owned by a talentless self-indulgent literature merchant who’s been playing only a few years. Girl friend said something to that effect, maybe less harsh, unable to believe that I could be so impractical and improvident. Money is to be saved invested for the home and kids and college and the heart attack machine. You wouldn’t sell your MGB to buy a piano? But I did.
The roads are crowded to the shoulders with cars running with fewer than a full capacity of passengers and every ditch has a couple of rusty ones in it. I don’t need a car. I just need a ride in one that doesn’t overheat. The thermostat is in, the hose reconnected, and we resume the intermitted journey. Naturally within two miles the temperature gauge
is standing on the H peg and we’re stopped in the middle of the Great American Desert with the cool cars running by in herds like bikini-clad girls or like bright metallic lizards. Consternation and consultation in the front seats.
oh Maybellene why can’t you be true
you done started back doin
the things you used to do
Who could be so asinine as to put a thermostat into an overheating engine with the temperature at 112 outside in the starry blue-eyed hope of cooling it. An afterthought of mine, didn’t occur at the time because I thought Navy Joe was a mechanic, what with his T-shirt and oversized tires. Also thought he was replacing an old thermostat with a cooler one rather than as I learn later putting in one where there had been none before. In short, thought he knew what he was doing and what do I know about mechanics anyway. What’re we going to do now, use the water in the ice chest, the geniuses say. Not much of it. Sit here baking till the cool of the evening maybe, which is only eight hours away, being one o’clock now.
The first thing to do is get out of the ovenish inwards of the van out into the relative chill of the hundred and twelve. Once out I sing Baddso a few lines of “Cool clear Water” and am surprised to find he knows the song. Didn’t know you had deserts in England or is it merely the power of pop.
Don’t you listen to him Dan
he’s a devil not a man
and he paints the burning sand
with water, cool clear water
At the chorus I spot a ditch fifteen yards from where we’re standing with warm murky water in it. I report this feature of the topography to Navy Joe and he orders his lackeys, the fourteen year old and the hitching brothers, to break out the empty pop bottles and haul water. There’s a freeway fence between the road and the ditch so the kid and I get on the other side and do the dipping while the brothers and Baddso foot the bottles back and forth. It’s the old pour it into the fan trick again, and in fifteen minutes we’ve got things cooled down, we refill the carton of pop bottles, reboard and head for the next filling station to pull out the thermostat. Baddso and I conferred while we were outside about abandoning the van and trying for another ride but Baddso said we ought to stay for one more breakdown to be polite. Both relieve to be moving again.
old Dan and I
with throats burned dry
and souls that cry
When a mile down the road the temperature gauge starts its H-ward swing and the cowl gets to hot to touch Navy Joe and the righthand kid get the cowl up with a hand apiece while Navy Joe holds us in the road at sixty-five MPH and the kid pours the ditch water into the fan. The spray comes back on us and the older brothers who is most exposed hides behind a map of California. The bottles cool the engine for another miles then it’s up with the cowl and into the fan with the ditch water again. With two more full bottles left we start refilling the empties from the two inches of cold water in the ice chest. After first removing the contents of course, two cans of cola and a small jar of vaseline. The kid pouring the water into the fan is having himself a fine old time. Each time the spray comes back and the older brother ducks behind California he grins broadly in toothy idiocy as if to say we’re sure having some hell of a ride huh.
We make it into a station just as the water runs out. Waterboy jumps out and hands in the hose and Navy Joe gets it spurting into the fan. Cool it down a little than park it out of the way till you can get your fingers back on those hot bolts. I fill some pop bottles and pour water over the bolts and other metallica (a heavy-metal band) to save Navy Joe from deep frying his fingers. Hold the radiator hose again and spray into the fan, pretty soon we’ve got Humpty together again. Fill all the pop bottles and the ice chest and re-embark. It’s three o’clock but Sacramento is only thirty-five miles away. Don’t ya listen to him Dan / he’s a devil not a man.
Navy Joe and Waterboy keep the fluids going into the fan at regular intervals while Baddso and the girl who was on the cowl fill bottles out of the chest. The four-year-old’s mother strips him naked and deposits him in the chest of water. He and I discuss my hat, wants to know am I cowboy or Indian. Mexican, I say, which in the westerns is a kind of ethnic limbo. Billy the Kid didn’t even count the Mexicans he shot, carving notches on his pistol only for the white men.
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
Four Years tries my hat on his head and is happy to find it fits as well sideways as frontwards or backwards. I give him the 98 cent history of the hat. His mother is a fine-looking young woman maybe nineteen or twenty fair complected with dark eyes and long dark hair. Barbara is in Kansas City by now. She smiles showing spaces among her front teeth and dark edges. Parental neglect there somewhere, the universal child sorrow, and now she has one of her own. Lady you and I might comfort one another but spirit and flesh both melt in this heat and Baddso and I shouldn’t go to Sacramento. Besides, besides I’m a traveling man who came from Kansas and who’s leaving California, an apotheosis of the spirit of movement riding in strange cars past all loves of dark haired women, abandoning the needful needless luxury of caring.
The power of motion says the Good Gray. No excitement like a new place or coming into a place unvisited for too many years. But one proscription is included: thou shalt not stay.You stay for three days and who you are comes down on you like the rain bucketing down in Vietnam. The free spirit dies to be resurrected only in movement and you’re as measurable and isolated as an ID card in an empty wallet. It was dark in the theatre, the movie was beginning and I couldn’t tell. I sat in back and watched George C. Scott tuning the engine of his Mercedes until my eyes adjusted then I moved down to the front row so I could climb inside the movie. It ends with George bloody and ghastly dead and the audience laughing and estranged from all humanity and wanting out of the theater I startup one aisle but see people I know who I couldn’t avoid speaking to so I backtrack and take the other aisle which is worse because there’s Mary with my usurper. Pretend not to see them and walk slowly with the crowd dizzy from eyestrain and free floating anxiety, no-cause nausea, bumping into the seats. Once I think Mary puts out her hand from behind to steady me and think I hear her offer some word of explanation to the boyfriend. God bless Mary used to be the repeated prayer.
A bit more ducking out of sight of people who know me but I don’t want to know them and I’m out in the night air walking fast two blocks to the New Haven Bar take a right and down the 12 Street hill in order to go past Barbara’s. Like truth, a huge hill to climb up, huge to go down, and he that will reach her about must and about must go and what the hill’s suddenness resists win so. I know she’s not home, it’s a weekend and she’s in love or worse, and she’s not home and I get down to Massachusetts the main drag and take a left away from my house and toward the nearest liquor store wanting to run but wearing sandals. The liquor store open this late is for the hard up, no cooler, no cold wine, no cold beer. Something to bring on the sleep Mr. Apothecary. The next place is nine blocks the other direction which legs can’t resist and can’t stop and I run for it having been in Kansas four days on my toes, hard, a fifth of something cold and white for the belly’s sake. Get some of it into me before I get home, don’t know what’s come over me unless it’s the Asian rain that falls mainly on the wayne. Dispel it on the keyboard, sit at piano and play the two sonatas I know, romantic, baby Beethoven and Lichner. It’s magic, it helps, it’s like nothing else, helps more than a car unless that car is taking you somewhere you’ve not been. The running too was good, should be put in the place of drink, gives the same comfort of mind without hanging you over. In the middle of this, Pat comes in, says not a word, motions me not to stop as if I would have, and sits on the couch. Good ol’ Patsy don’t speak to me, don’t stay too long, have some wine then let me sleep alone. I would go somewhere but I have just come back.
No to Sacramento
No, Baddso and I aren’t going to Sacramento, not even for a day and the dreamy dream of affection. Navy Joe lets us off where I-5 crosses I-880 which in turn connects with I-80, which goes to Reno. Goodbye group and we walk down the long approach ramp to 800. Before we’re properly there we get a ride in a station wagon with a sympathetic woman of apparent Mexican-Indian extraction. Those under the majority thumb boot-heel help each other, she couldn’t bear to see us trekking in the hundred and twelve. She has her teenage boy with her in the front seat drinking a quart of cold cola which he hands back to us. The air conditioner is poorl but the woman and her boy radiate kindness more comforting to the jaded spirit than cold air. Sweet dark lady I think you are my mother, could we come home with you. I’d mow the lawn, converse in filial deference with your husband about politics. For dinner there might be sopapillas dipped in honey and great goblets of iced tea dripping condensed humidity down their sides onto our bare brown stomachs, mine as brown as yours, Mama.
She’s only going out to the edge of town but that’s a great help because it puts us smack on the side of the I-80 macadam. We say thanks and as she pulls away we see that we are at the point where 80 and 880 divide, with the former on the left. We decide to cross and use the left shoulder to hitch from, but there are six lanes of 70+ mph traffic in each direction and we have these damned packs. Baddso starts across as soon as we speak of it and he makes it to the shoulder. I’m a bit surprised, didn’t look like much of a chance to me and usually Baddso doesn’t take chances with his carcass. I go down the road a hundred yards before I work up the nerve to cross. A matter of sheer gut because there are no opportunities, just have to hope a car will slow down.
As I’m getting across a big two-seater pickup, muck-begrimed green, pulls up ahead of us and we run to climb in.
The driver about our age and about my hair length, says he ‘s only going a mile but he wanted to get us off the freeway before the highway patrol saw us. Says they really bust people around here for hitching on the freeway and he’ll take us to an approach we can legally hitch off of. A great kindness, the heart’s heart of a good Samaritan, to keep strangers out of the hands of the police. We gotta hang together or we’ll all hang separately. Brother, we thank you, avoid Wichita Kansas because there they jail you just for walking through town. Tales of the open road told on the road.
Little traffic down the approach ramp where the Samaritan lets us off. Baddso and I decide for something to eat and drink, it being mid-afternoon, the oatmeal long since fled from the upper intestine. Now a restaurant in clear sight and the sunshine hard enough to kill camels. Walk through a gate in the freeway fence, across a parking lot, around a big bank with signs declaring the immeasurable advantages of getting and spending, and into the restaurant where we park our bags out of the way and wait for a waitress to seat us. One minute and the heat has evaporated my patience--I ask the cashier where we can sit. Says at the counter or wait for the waitress to seat us. I just want to sit and we go to the counter. I have a cold turkey sandwich, ordered in fond memory but since unequaled sandwiches eaten while driving across Michigan and Illinois--in another country and besides the wench is dead--and iced tea which against personal habit I sweeten for the energy charge. Baddso drinks a coke then has a hamburger and another coke. No refills for the tea. We wash hands and faces in the restroom, Baddso retires his pack, and it’s back out into the steaming and streaming sunlight of Lord Helios.
Now two hitchers ahead of us at the start of the ramp so we go on down a hundred yards. Twenty minutes later they get a ride in a pickup and we thumb them as they go by. Like to ride in the back of that pickup. We move up to their vantage point and in ten minutes get a ride in a Mustang. I’m in the back and Baddso is in front carrying the conversation. His turn to carry it. Driver seems a friendly soul. Later Baddso tells me how impressed he was with the driver’s congeniality and we both marvel at what a straight-eight seemingly normal middle-class type he was, the kind that never stops. Must have done some hitching sometime. He takes us to Roseville some eighteen miles where we well remember stopping before on a freight train, but from the ramp we’re standing on there’s no indication of those miles and miles of freight yard or the sleazy shacktown adjoining it.
Lots of traffic down the ramp and in fifteen minutes we’re riding with a girl in a station wagon, another sympathizer couldn’t think of us standing by the roadside roasting in the heat. Thank God that heat kindles sympathy. Everybody’s been hot sometime and bothered by it. I love the sun even when I can’t bear him, that brave man and tireless traveler, riding always east to west. Fears of my bed, fears of life and fears of death run away. Mary quoted those lines.
The woman driving is going to Lake Tahoe where the water if cold and clear. She works summers in a swimming pool as a life guard and instructor and has got a weekend off to see her sister in Tahoe City or Squaw Valley and in the fall she’s going to Austria or Australia and she’s been going to school at Cal State in Chico and loves the country there but has quit because it got to be a rut. I’m too enamored to follow the conversation though it’s me she’s talking to or through, Baddso hidden being hidden behind his pack in the rear seat. I love her freckled nose, the skin peeling like lifeguard’s noses always do in the summer, her blonde sun-frazzled hair tied up revealing her sun-ripened neck like the south side of a peach with the light picking up the small hairs. Take us to Tahoe, Miss Sunshine, and we’ll bathe in the cold, cold water, the clear deep lake water, and eat dinner at your sister’s house in Squaw Valley or Tahoe City and you and I will have a few days’ love and sleep under white sheets and air conditioning and Baddso will talk in the kitchen all night about the rain in Great Britain and we’ll have toast and coffee in the mornings with Florida oranges.
Aswim in this vision I turn to Baddso and begin priming his pump for a quick side trip to Tahoe. My idea is that if she sees we’re interested in visiting Tahoe on our own she’ll be more likely to invite us to Green Pastures or wherever. To my surprise Baddso agrees without my having to coax him. What’s happened to his hurry to get back to Kansas. The more surprising because he doesn’t swim. Bless you, old Baddso, you shall soak. I haul out the roadmap. Oh a very feasible idea! I needlessly explain it to him in order to be overheard, there’ll be the usual problems of finding somewhere to sleep and the expense of eating out. As we approach the turnoff to Highway 89, she wants to know which way we’re going and we say Tahoe. She says fine, I’m going to Squaw Valley but you shouldn’t have any trouble getting a ride the rest of the way. She is very kind, she is very friendly, here eyes are the color of ocean with the sun slanting on it and not a drop to drink. She’s not inviting us to her sister’s house.
At Lake Tahoe
That’s OK, grateful anyway, we’ve got the time and part of the money to act like tourists. The road to Tahoe follows Silver Creek, a calendar picture swift white-water stream, looks it would be good for trout in the pools, blue and green pools, like to swim in one, and where we get out the stream is only fifty yards away. Across the road is a gas station and coffee house where we go for something to drink and a piss, but the coffee house is closed. We piss anyway then walk back to the road. I start across and Baddso wants to know where I’m going. To the creek, the creek, to the blessed water and the creek. We go down a slope, find ourselves out of sight of the road but directly across from someone’s house. Given the probably cost of water-fronting around here and the size of the house it must belong to Dives for whom we’d be Lazarus and his brother. We take off packs and beggar rags except for cutoffs, empty our pockets, and wade out. The water is miraculous. Melted snow and fast over round rocks under foot. Splash the magical stuff around, over the hot body shoulders back and stomach, up the legs and arms, onto the face, swish it around in the mouth over grimy teeth and reviving tongue. Tastes fine but I don’t drink any of it. Maybe a dairy half a mile upstream with a hundred blissful piss-full holsteins making milk to go with the fish that will feed the multitudinous poor.
We exit dripping, dress without a pause to dry, and climb back onto the road. The real cooling off is yet to come, in Tahoe itself. In five minutes we’ve got a ride in the back of an old pale blue pickup, a Ford, with a freak our age and a chick, just keeping the world oiled on its axel. When we get to Tahoe City the driver asks where we want to go. We don’t know or care, anywhere near the water. Three blocks to the swimming beach, he says--that way. We walk the way he points, past a bridge over a river and a huge but decayed sign reading Feed the Big Rainbows and through a small wooden gate with a sign that says Beach. It’s our first good look at the lake, blue blue and it goes on forever. The “beach” is a great stretch of grass with picnic tables fireplaces and restrooms and a small strip of good sand along the shore. Not a great crowd of people considering I can see right away we’re back in one of the fur-lined inner recesses of one of God’s uncountable fat pockets.
Baddso and I go one at a time to the restrooms to change, leaving one of us with the packs on the grass. Me first. Step into the water. Sheeyut!--it’s not water it’s electric liquid hydrogen, but there are kids swimming and no corpses floating so I wade on out. Very slowly. I’m standing there with my face screwed past the sticking point and a fourteen year old girl walking out into the water says Cold isn’t it and keeps on walking a ways then plunges in. Obviously the way to do it, I was a child once and know that. By the time Baddso comes out from dressing I’ve got my nerve worked up and plunge in.
The tingle in the skin from the contact must be something like what Raphael felt standing in the almighty’s beacon. Since God is light and never but in light dwelt from eternity, this element too belongs in some way to me.
I swim out to a rock fifty yards out and climb up. The water is nowhere between the rock and shore more than neck deep, and the sandy bottom gives way to rocks as you reach the one on which I sit. The water as I look at it is clear to the point of distortion. It magnifies and shows all outlines and surfaces clearer larger and more perfectly luminous than they ever could be in extra-aquatic existence. Baddso wades out close to where I perch and observes that Tahoe would be more appropriately named Clear Lake than the Clear Lake we’ve just left behind us in Lake County, California. Yes, indeed so.
We go back to shore together and there I wash out the Oregon T-shirt I’ve been wearing--that is, I dip it in the lake three times then stretch it out on the grass in the sunlight. Baddso said at first that he would take a run while we were here but now he suggests that we might still make it to Reno today. It’s only five thirty and I agree. We change clothes and start walking, stopping at a grocery where I buy two peaches and two nectarines which we eat while we hold our thumbs out. Some guy is pulling out of the gas station next to us and I fix him with my glittering eye. He stops and takes us to the Squaw Valley road, the spot where we were let off by the blue-eyed lifeguard, and says he’ll be back through in ten minutes and take us the rest of the way to the interstate if we’re still waiting. The man is French as he tells us in response to a question of Barry’s and for a moment I have a silly impulse to say what Aunt Hazel would in small-world-isn’t-it surprise, Hey Baddso’s been to France and my nephew too. Brain flotsam.
As the driver is letting us out a friend of his stops to talk with him and then gives us a lift to the interstate, seven miles. He’s driving an old pickup and there’s a girl with him in the front seat. Maybe all the freaks around Tahoe have an old pickup and a teenage girl in the front seat. Shades of 1955. They They’re in front smoking a joint and we’re in back. Baddso watching the country pass and pleased to be in his favorite traveling situation, sitting in the back of a pickup, Poundso shivering in a wet T-shirt and watching the girl’s vertebrae which are in pretty evidence down to her waist. The driver hands back the joint on a clip when it’s half gone. A community of human kindness there seems to be around Tahoe. Baddso doesn’t want any of it, so smoke alone and watch the trees float tumbling past.
Feeling fine when they let us out, haven’t felt so fine since I arrived in Kelseyville at midnight and I return the roach, a quarter inch left, and thank the driver for the double lift. While the next half hour passes waiting for a ride I’m doing soft-shoe routines in the center island of the intersection and practicing floats with arms spread sailing in easy spirals like a hawk. There’s nothing like taking a load off your heart, however you get it off. When the ride comes it’s a new bright metallic green Chevy pickup going to Reno. The drive winds it up to 90 mph and holds it there as he tells us how often he makes the Reno-Taho trip and back and how much he drives and how many miles he’s already put on this pickup. It’s a good truck and he drives well enough so I relax, occasionally listen and in half an hour we’re in Reno. I-80 doesn’t bypass just goes through the city center past the casinos with acre-large glittering signs blinking out Harold’s and the many marriage chapels advertising everything, golden balls (gonads?) to curb service. No waiting period or tests for people and this attracts a lot of horny and love-locked couples from California and elsewhere to come here. And they can take a swim in Tahoe after the ceremony to get some kind of damper on the fires of lust so as not to consume each other. Night has fallen by the time the pickup parks.
Baddso and myself been keeping track of the railroad coming into town and when we get out we proceed directly to a supermarket to stock up on the railway bum’s staples. Our third foam ice chest of the trip, ice beer bread cheese and for variety and relish a jar of pickles. The tracks we now walk along like the freeway go right through the city and we walk between tall buildings dark on the side facing the tracks but crossed every block by a brightly lit avenue full of gamblers in glad rags and newlyweds with fifty-cent coins for the slots. Seem to recall that Aunt Hazel comes to Reno occasionally for a spot of gambling, clean entertainment fun for the whole family. Why not. Get three lemons in a line and you’ve got enough boodle to get married. Brides and grooms supplied at the chapel for a nominal extra fee.
Walking east because a phonebook map shows the location of the freight yard eastward. In confirmation we’re passed by a west-bound freight gathering speed and not slowing down for anything west of us but we begin to doubt our directions when we’ve walked to the edge of the city and still no indication of the yard. Baddso waits with the packs while I go out to the street and inquire. Suddenly it occurs to me that a freight yard and its office are probably in different parts of town so I recheck a phonebook, find that such is the case and that the yard is in Sparks three miles to the east. That I should live so long and remains so stupid. Go back and tell Baddso the news and we sit down on a flat car and have a sandwich and a beer apiece. Good sitting here eating, suddenly peaceful and an appetizing place to be. Rest from travel, cool breeze of evening, cold beer good as it only is when you’re hot and tired and hungry enough. Then it doesn’t matter if you’re drinking Michelob or Blatz, if it’s cold it’s nectar.
Ten thirty when dinner is over, late for hitching, but we stroll out to the street to try for an hour. If no luck we can sleep here and go on in the morning. In half an hour we have a ride to Sparks with a young guy our age and shaggy-haired wearing a profit-motive suit and tie. Friendly and helpful he lets us off near the yard. We stagger down a steep concrete embankment, round the freeway fence, cross a ten-acre parking lot belonging to a block-huge casino-hotel-restaurant-chapel, and we’re in the yard. A big place and crowded with lines of cars, we climb across a few of the lines to get out of the flood-lights then look for a boxcar. Find nothing so we bed down on the second tier of an automobile-carrier flatcar.
A good first day out, a record fourteen rides covering probably three hundred miles of tricky roads including a trip to Tahoe. Almost asleep, I hear the faint gathering rumble of a line of cars beginning to move and lying on my back see the cars on the adjoining track drift past. We’re moving. Yell at Baddso who’s asleep to get his ass in gear and jump off the before we pick up too much speed but as I get up I see it is the line of cars next to us that is moving, not us. Studies in relativity. Feel foolish and lie back to sleep. Throughout the night I come half-awake and tense in expectation as I hear cars beginning to move. Each time sounds like the line we’re on but always when the loudest coupling clash comes it’s a line to one side of us. The jar of a hard coupling can shake your joints loose if you’re not ready for it. Kept bracing all night but come morning we had still not turned a wheel.
El Reno and Winnemucca
Six-thirty by the sun when I wake in the morning. Nudge Baddso and while he’s getting his bedroll together I walk to the yard office to inquire for a train. Not many people around but there’s an office with four men sitting around at desks and coffee. One of them is black and gets picked as the most likely to be helpful. Help his down trodden brother. He says there’s nothing moving until nine-thirty, then they’ll be rolling out of here like that, snapping his fingers three times. Thanks I say and walk happily back to Baddso. Nothing moving until nine-thirty says I and then the whole yard is going to roll east and all we got to do is be here and fall on top of something that’s moving. In the meantime, how about some coffee. Right mate, and we stroll out to the street, men of leisure and means. No hour like early morning, it brings back the heroic ages as Henry’s words come back to me again. All the restaurants look more like casinos than places to eat. As you walk past the door of such an eatery all you see are gilded banks of slot machines with hungry midnight movers and all night swingers yanking the handles. Looks a lot like masturbation and works the same way: you screw yourself till you’re spent. Baddso is pleased as a child with all this gaud and trinketry and I know we’re going to end up breakfasting in a casino before we leave Nevada. Even my aunt Hazel of the warm and generous heart comes here to play the one-armed bandits. Suddenly a man coming out of a restaurant asks me for a quarter--healthy looking man in his early 40s looking like suburbia’s soul of fifteen years ago, open-necked white sport shirt with blue polkadots, dark blue neatly pressed trousers with pleats, shiny black shoes. No friend says I. I have a quarter but I can’t help you. My buddy here and I are hitching around the country on dimes and nickels. He understands, oh he understands, it’s quite alright. I’m afraid for a moment that he’s going to shake my hand. Maybe still knew at bumming quarters and embarrassed. Yes, we could afford a quarter but no one can afford to encourage moral infirmity. When you’re up early after a night’s sleep it’s easy to be self-righteous, just as when you’re up early after a sleepless night it’s easy to be morally infirm. Where’d I learn to be such a Mrs. Grundy.
Walking on, we peer into plate-glass dimnesses, and I offer Baddso a half apology for the false alarm created during the night when I thought our train was moving. A needless apology as I hadn’t awakened him. I sometimes get angry with myself for acting like I’m the only one who has enough sense not to stand under a rock slide but Baddso never seems to mind. If he sleeps through a false alarm, he’ll sleep through a real one, as we both did at Stockton. Huh--what was that. Avalanche you said. Someone is yelling at us. A man has spotted us walking east with our packs and wants to know if we need a ride in that direction. Thank you, of course. He’s going to the next town, Winnemucca, 160 miles away. Automobile travel is not in our itinerary--we were going to ride trains from Reno to Grand Junction Colorado and rest a few days there with some relatives of mine--but we agree, thinking we can start the trains in Winnemucca as easily as here.
Baddso gets us all a large cup of coffee from the nearest restaurant and we hop into a beaten up ‘65 Dodge and take off. Our friend the driver is young, dressed in straight clothes with shaggy hair and a beard and works for a child care center in Reno. Going to Winnemucca for a meeting from which he expects nothing but sweat and boredom. I have greater expectations caused by the name Winnemucca. Great going to a town with that name. The only such town in the United States, surely, and there the one made famous in song, Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere.” I can still sing it:
I was totin' my pack along a dusty Winnemucca road
When along came a semi with high and canvas covered load
If you're going to Winnemucca Mack, with me, you can ride
So I climbed into the cab, and then I settled down inside
He asked me if I've seen a road with so much dust and sand
And I said, "Listen, bud, I've travelled every road in this here land."
I've been everywhere man
I've been everywhere, man
Across the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel, I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere
I've been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota
Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma, Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma
Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo, Tocopilla, Barranquilla, and Padilla, I'm a killer
The landscape coming out of Reno is grand and forbidding. For twenty miles along the freeway there are hitchers strung out singly, in twos and threes, and I feel very fortunate and safe to be riding instead of roasting by the roadside knowing the meat-eating sun and probably the buzzards would be on your back before anyone was likely to stop for you. We were 4500 feet high and the freeway through the mountainous terrain for thirty miles follows a river. Then the river disappears but the mountains continue, shades of pale blue and dull yellow in the sunshine. The Tuckee River, must run into Lake Tahoe. To the north of us Pond Peak, Two Tips North summit, far to the north the Nightingale Mountains, and to the south Hot Springs Mountains. So many many small ranges of mountains must have exhausted the ingenuity of the people who named them though not of the terrestrial forces that made them.
I sit watching this high desert country go by so strange to a traveler that knows only the flatter deserts that stretch from southern California to Texas, wishing I knew more about American geography, more about mountains and deserts. My own sweet and murderous country and I know little about it except folklore and the history of politics--and Walt Whitman’s magnificent catalogues. I hadn’t before thought of northern Nevada as desert but down the sides of the mountains nothing is growing but scattered scrub brush. And the towns, only two in the 160 miles between Reno and Winnemucca--Lovelock and Mill City and the former will surely be a ghost town when the freeway is finished and bypasses it. At Lovelock you’re in the Humboldt Range with the Trinity and Seven Troughs ranges to the north and Rye Patch Reservoir, Star Peak, and Buffalo Mountain. There is monotony to the traveler’s eye that is certainly not expressed in the florid names of places. The eyes of the white people who settled here (after killing off the Indians), one eye on the heavenly paradise the other on terrestrial profit, have recorded nightingales and buffalo, the trinity and the stars, and patches of rye. Probably the principle of their name giving is not much different from the one that I employ when seventeen hours into sitting at the edge of Amarillo I tell Baddso that we’re in God’s Pocket. I have no monopoly on irony--a lot of place names originate in that spirit, like calling some hell hole Paradise. Only Lovelock and Mill City today endure but every twenty to thirty miles there is a road sign pointing off with a name on it like Oceana, Imlay, Tungsten, Antelope Springs, and the mileage, and below the first sign a second one saying No Services, meaning no stations, restaurants, motels, or other facilities to meet the needs of the desert-trekking caravan. I ask our child-tender drive what these signs refer to but he doesn’t know, thinks possibly ranches of some kind. Sure, raising rattle snakes and lizards for the great northwest trade.
Getting to the Santa Fe tracks necessitates walking through downtown which pleases me because I want to get a postcard of this magically named bewitching place, the oasis and hub as nearly as I can see on which the whole desert turns for a diameter of 160 miles and more. As the Good Gray has it there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe. Nor any place so barren. I duck into a hotel for postcards while Baddso waits outside. I have to go through a casino to get into the restaurant where I see postcards. They’ve got bloody ones for the bloody minded and the sore loser, cards showing the desert tragedy of death by thirst with buzzards picking the carcass while the blood still flows, depicted with all the shocking realism of detail of a 1970 movie like Eastwood’s A Fist Full of Dollars. Meant to show the folks back home what a death-defying trip you have undertaken in crossing northern Nevada and wish you were here. I buy two cards sowing downtown Winnemucca looking like every other large town in America in spite of its poetic name, one card for Mary who knows the Hank Snow song and one for friends in Chandler who put in a pre-departure request for word once a week.
When I emerge from the hotel Baddso tells me he’s heard a train go past in the direction of the Santa Fe line. Hurry the few remaining blocks to the track but can see no train when he get there. If it went through it didn’t stop. There’s a lumber company nearby and we go thee to ask which way the Santa Fe freight office is. The man says this is the office and can I help you. I ask about the train that just went through. It didn’t stop he says, the trains on this line practically never stop. Baddso and I walk back into town with six and a half hours until a train is due. We search for a place to eat but are told there is none, just restaurants, all of which look very expensive and very like casinos. We go into the cheapest looking place and order the breakfast special. I go take a wash and find the facilities all present--soap hot water towels--but the breakfast we’re served is the sorriest we’ve encountered. The hash-browns are white as maggots, the “over medium” eggs runny, and the toast just about fit to choke a hog. Across the plush red carpet there is a traveling family with a baby that bawls incessantly. I watch them in the gilt-bordered long mirrors on the opposite wall as I clean up my plate. By asking for it, we get one refill on the coffee.
We pay up, sling our packs on, and step through the glass door to the sidewalk, out of the clammy-handed air conditioning into the good dry air and the heat of the eleven a.m. sun coming down on the mountains and on the town. Sunshine, all fall down, gold in the mountains, take a mule and go around--prospecting if I had a pet buzzard to be my brother and companion, circling enough to find us water and carrion Old buzz, a gold old fuzz is what he wuz, walks me to the edge of town and picks us a spot under the shade of a motel sign to hitch from. The motel proprietor an oriental hosing down his driveway and the sidewalk in front. When anyone from town drives by a wave is exchanged with the boss man. He speaks to us but neither Baddso nor I understand what he says for the noise of a diesel engine running on a truck parked a hundred feet down the highway. When the spray of his hose begins to cool our ankles--rainwater keeping my motor cool--we figure out he wants us to move our packs out of the way so he can hose down the sidewalk next to them. Glad to oblige, hoping for spray on the ankles because while there is a lot of through traffic nothing is stopping. Sprinklers set in the grass next to where we’re standing--rainwater keeping my motor cool, oh Maybellene. He’s putting out out enough water for a foot wash and it feels very fine, the cool water puddles in the soft grass, the leaves of grass wet between our toes. Let the traffic go on by. There’s a train at four-thirty, three hours away down the track. Playing in the sprinklers I spot a golfball lying lost half-hidden in the grass on the other side of a lawn fence. Rescue it. What a mighty rebound the ball makes on concrete. Play catch with Baddso, straight catch, one-bounce catch, a high bounce goes far over our heads and we chase it down the street. Whenever a car passes the game stops and we put up our thumbs and look sincere. No games inside the car, we promise. Baddso gets into the fun of it and begins calling me Poundsieo. Locker room mentality. I call him Baddsieo. Ah the ritual of sport. Thou rag, thou remnant, I call him, thou paltry quantity. Insult is the universal language of play. Time passes and so do the cars, none stopping.
He asked me if I’d seen a road with so much dust and sand
And I said listen man I’ve traveled every road in this here land
Listen. A whistle. I hear it again, from behind me, loud, and I turn around. Desert mirage, don’t heed it, looks like someone standing beside a pickup waving us to come and ride. The whistle comes again and since there are no aural mirages in any comic book I ever read I get Baddso’s attention and we run with packs on shoulders toward the pickup. A new Dodge pickup with a camper on it and a young guy, nineteen, long brown hair pulled back in a rubber band, delicate features and wide mouth, almost girlish. Baddso tells him we’re going to Salt Lake City and the guy says Sure, we’re going through there. We’re going to Omaha Nebraska. You’ll have to ride in the camper, no room in the front. Fine, fine, says Baddso as we move our packs through the door of the camper and climb in. Make yourself comfortable with whatever you find says our friend and closes the door.
Crossing the Peak
Comes out of nowhere right here in Winnemucca Nevada peak experience, the ride of a life time. If there are portents Baddso and companion are blind bats and can’t read them.
Curiously, the occupants of the smart covered pick-up were a woman, late 30s, and her 7-year-old daughter. The lady told us she‘d concluded divorce proceedings in Sacramento and had to maintain 85mph through the night so as to meet a deadline with her next husband in Chicago. For this, she needed co-drivers. That was our role in the venture.
The door swings vertically and open and shuts from the outside but I see the catch can be operated from the inside. I wouldn’t like to feel shut away. A middle aged woman and an seven year old boy in the front seat with the driver. The woman is driving and we take off quickly. Well Poundsie says Baddsie with manifest satisfaction, we’ve got a big one. It’s four hundred miles to Salt Lake City and they’re going on to Omaha, and only a little over two hundred miles from Omaha to Lawrence. I hitched it before, going to South Dakota. I agree it looks good. We can lay back here a long time since we’ve got food beer and water in the ice chest.
The pickup is a compact of some sort and hasn’t a lot of room in its bed. Further crowded by four saddles and two bridles piled in the front of the bed and two suitcases in back but there are quilts lying around and clothes to be lain on and we settle back to savor the sensation of rolling down the road again. Stand in one place for a few hours and when you start to move again it feels like you’ve just inherited a great good fortune. The trouble with settling back in this camper is that you can see nothing out the windows except the empty sky. You have to bolt yourself upright to get a glimpse of the country side. Try to watch but it becomes a strain. Towns are a little more frequent than between Reno and Winnemucca, their names still various and strange--Goldconda, Valmy, Battle Mountain, Beowawe (bay-É™-WAH-wee), Carlin, and Elko, the next large town 150 miles from Winnemucca. Beowawe’s in Eureka county which has a population of 1800. Flying on the dark side of the moon here under sunshine pouring down. During breakfast I wrote the two postcards I bought but they’re still in my pocket. Transfer them to the pack to avoid the ravages of sitting.
Baddso and I split a beer and haul out our books. He’s almost to the middle of Grapes of Wrath and still excited at finding mention of places along Route 66 where he’s been. It is exciting to know from your own experience that something in a book corresponds to something in what we call the real world. Every once and a while he is stumped by a place he doesn’t remember. Did we go through Vega Texas, Poundso. Yeah I say and tell him we were riding with Curly and Bare Toes. Curly walked from there to Clovis New Mexico with his 100 pound pack. Don’t you remember our laughing at the boosterism of naming nowhere after a star of the first magnitude, brightest in the constellation Lyra. Shines on Star Peak in northern Nevada. Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.
Pause in the conversation and Baddso asks whether I think the child in the front seat is a boy or a girl. I’m a little amused when he asks me this. I heard it from him a few times before. Now it may happen to anyone that from a distance or with obstructed view that they cannot tell a person’s sex, especially that of a child, but what amuses me is why Baddso should be so uncomfortable that he doesn’t know, as if it were his own sexual identity that he’s concerned about, the more amusing because it’s a habit that seems to be typical of athletes who like to crack jokes about what big whangs they have. A boy, I answer him and ask Why? Meaning, how can there be any question. Look at her hair, he says, surely that’s not a boy’s hair. I’ve already looked at his hair. The kid has been observing us through the window and gives an impish smile as much as to say he knows we’ve been observing him. He has bright blonde hair, cut in bangs around the front and gradually longer by the sides until it’s shoulder length in back, a style currently fashionable among young women. I make nothing of this, especially given the somewhat feminine appearance of the older brother. Such pretty hair, I’m thinking, and then he begins to brush it with the aid of the rearview mirror. Well vanity is not peculiar to one sex, and how the brush makes his hair shine. Still making fun of Baddso I tell him to ask the kid at the next stop--hey are you a boy or a --girl and get a punch in the eyeball. I will, says Baddso, but more subtly, I’ll ask her name. I itemize for him the appearances by which it is evident to me that this child is a boy. Small light blue eyes, mischievous wrinkles at the outside corners when he smiles, a boy’s eyes. His smile and way of laughing, his gestures and mannerisms, his facial expressions, his western garb, a boy to the toes and tips of him. Nevertheless, says Baddso, I’ll ask. The kid watches through the back glass as we drink from the canteen of cold water and makes incomprehensible signals with his hands. I like the kid--looks like he’s full of the devil, which would be a wholesome relief from the presence of the serious woman at the wheel. Who, in spite of my first impression, turns out to be a warm and caring woman showing the strain of keeping up an average speed of 85 mph for over a thousand miles.
The question about the kid is soon resolved when somewhere short of Elko the pickup stops. The guy who whistled at us comes back and opens our door, explaining we’ve stopped to use a roadside toilet. Baddso and I and the woman stay in the truck while the others go into the stone building by the roadside. In a few minutes the seven year old climbs into the back with us, the door is shut, and we’re picking up speed, leveling off at eight-five. The kid is bursting at the seams with questions and information. The guy who whistled at us, s/he says, is a hitcher too. His name is Al and he’s from Pennsylvania and on his way home. Eventually in a conversation about horses she volunteers her name, Teresa, and asks ours. Names exchanged we return to horses. I say to Baddso I bet you think that proves something, don’t you. He smiles. Teresa and her mother started out in Truckee California about noon. I tell her we were there the evening before and swam in the lake. Teresa pulls her bathing suit out of a heap of clothes to show me. Baddso has long since gone back to the Grapes, so I poke him. Baddso, I owe you a beer. The bathing suit is a girl’s, one-piece blue stretch material with shoulder straps cut to cover the chest and non-existent breasts. I look at Teresa again. She is still as pure and boyish a boy as I have ever looked at. Except for the hair. And the name. And the bathing suit.
Cameo 8
1. Winnemucca, Nevada, to Lincoln, Nebraska: the longest hitch-hike ride of my life – and, no doubt, of yours, Poundso--1237 miles. Winnemucca, it was a name you remembered from a once-popular song: “I been everywhere, man.”
Curiously, the occupants of the smart covered pick-up were a woman, late 30s, and her 7-year-old daughter. The lady told us she‘d concluded divorce proceedings in Sacramento and had to maintain 85mph through the night so as to meet a deadline with her next husband in Chicago. For this, she needed co-drivers. That was our role in the enterprise.
The kid took a liking to you. I remember the two of you galloping hand in hand, back to the truck after a rest stop.
What does he do? the mother asked me.
He’s working on his doctorate.
She nodded slowly. He’ll make a good doctor. He likes children.
Cameo 9
At some point in the journey, the lady stopped and picked up another man, younger than us. So the vehicle was pretty full: two in the front, three -- and a massive horse saddle -- in the back.
During one of his stints, the newcomer hit and killed a deer while driving in darkness. We dragged it to the side of road and sped on across vast flat Nebraska.
South of Lincoln, Hitchhiker Phobia
On the final leg of our grand journey, Hitchhiker Phobia raised its menacing head again. After shopping at a grocery store, Baddso and Pounds hauling on their backpacks when a hard-faced woman of 50 plus came bustling out to thrust herself on me. Where do you think you’re going? You haven’t paid. Come on. Open that bag. You ain’t paid! Without a word, I opened my fist to show her the crumpled receipt I’d just received. She swung around to turn on Baddso. Then it’s you who ain’t paid! As cool as could be, he showed her his receipt. Without another word, she turned on her heel and walked back to the store. An incredible performance, says Baddso. If the woman was the manager, why didn’t she simply – politely -- ask to see the receipts. He put it down to hitchhiker phobia – the old HP; that instinctive distrust of backpack travelers which obviated the need to treat them with courtesy, according to Baddso.
Of course she may also be remembering an old visit from Charlie Starkweather or, a decade later, Charles Manson and the Manson Family, all serial killers of widely reputed charm.
Note from the year 2025
Above in mid-thought is where the 1972 typescript ends. In Lawrence the sparrows must have still been quarreling--I don’t remember. No does Baddso or myself recall how we got from Omaha Nebraska to Lawrence Kansas, though he does comment somewhere that’s it’s a hike he made once with his Jack Pack and had no trouble going or coming.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Poems and Pictures
Kansas was a good place to begin. I’d written poems earlier, but they were derivative in form and language. The closest approach I made to being myself was imitating the inimitable Ogden Nash in high school, and in college writing a sonnet sequence against the clock, each poem done in ten minutes, thus spontaneously discovering surrealism. In the army I’d extended this style to letters, to the puzzled dismay of my correspondents. But even before 1972, the year of the journey, I had taken to heart Rimbaud’s drunken-boat instruction that the poet must derange his mind.
The poems are not dated, but I have placed them in rough chronological order, though the last poem about Basic Training in the Army is later (1980s),. The 1970s were a time to begin, though I had no idea of beginning anything. It was all desperation.
Most of the poems listed here are not referred to in the text. The exceptions are no. 9 and 10. All the poems are from the period of the Eugene journey and are included here as background to aid the reader in understanding the narrator of the text. It is safe to ignore them.
1. Sycamore
In cold spring I was awed how geese went by
dark against March sky in high martial liberty.
I stood in awe of freedom
freedom in the sky
freedom blossoming forth
over the earth of a political kingdom.
Cold sap slid in my veins uncongealed in longing
but I had not human strength to leap. I was rooted like a tree.
--March 1969, Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri
2. A Portrait of the Aesthete as a Young Soldier
He read what they wrote about the Asian War,
How Robert Bly felt outrage driving across Minnesota.
He, the aesthete, was there--in '68, in the Mekong Delta Just after Tet: there was nothing he saw there
That was not familiar. They slept in long sheds Under tin roofs. Men went out to the fields at dawn,
Long files of roaches and silverfish moving. The night skies leaped up like the fourth of July.
He slept well at night. Mortars over the tin roofs,
Rain reminded him of Oklahoma. Louder than incoming rounds
Was the night-long earth-jarring of the answering battery. He was only offended by Armed Forces Radio
And the sotted despair of men grouped without purpose-- Poker, beer, and the endless jests at sodomy.
He believed in another world, in August returned to Kansas in the first troop withdrawals. There, at his desk,
He studied Chinese characters. Free at last, Among steel filing cabinets.
3. The Death of a Student
Where is the cause of all these pains and cries
in Kansas where the world succumbs
and the elms die? who has twisted you
and within you all the order of the world?
In August the stadium falls, the sunlight
falls, kindles the pool where three dogs splash.
Shadows brindle the canine prows, the light
through colossal absence falls on the reeded water.
Canned in sardine days, the pickled corpse keeps.
They fit us on our sides like spoons
the one lidless eye cupping upward.
They loosen the muscular armor of the skull
and those bands biting in like football laces.
In the spring the elder student falls—gallstones
it may be bring him to hospital. What kills him
does not appear, the fibers of the body vibrate
like a whistle fitted on columned steam.
Pigskin molders in the lockered dark, the student
succumbs to exhaustion, thoughtfully.
Outside his body.
4. 1st of May, Dorn’s White Dog Again
Dear Marney, the redbuds dance in the rain at dawn Are they our supple children, black, ecstatic?
We are fallen outside time in Kansas
The knots that held the net burned through.
Saturday in the five-acre shadow of that green
The sun poured out illumination on the lawn
charred all the grass blades black at the edges
and a great cream dog in expanding ellipses
kept galloping the boundaries of what seemed.
The dog seeks the space his Soul can occupy—
How did our fate ever get so Egyptian?
who received from their dogs their access to Heaven?
May brings the pyramids back to Kansas
sealing us sweet for a thousand years.
Rain on the limestone roofs seeps through,
the air grows thick from the sprouting wheat.
5. Kaw Sings in Unsearchable August
Kaw fished the innumberable river
where the poem of longing lay—
poised in one medium, assured, no amphibian.
Kaw knew this river ran translucent sense,
sands at its banks marked the drift of its reason.
Vision angled at the shifting banks, the poet casts.
Nights he throws bloodbait, days bright skirted wrigglers,
but always filaments, filaments casting.
The poem rides in the currents of dream:
on sandbeds where sense flows the same bed over.
Like silt in the pull of the sliding Kaw.
the carp exult in the slipping murk
enwreathing the sand in lucent tunes.
I bike across the river at 8 a.m.
These words all come from down there.
6. The Spaces Between White Houses
It is a country for dying in, Kansas
The houses with smooth pine floors—
Wide spaces hold the homes apart
The cellar doors lean open all summer.
The yard cat dies,
Struck down by panic on Kentucky Street
Or Tennessee, but we know better finally and
Plant him in back by the passion flowers.
The homeowners gather on Saturday night,
In South Park there is no death;
As dark falls they dance in civic lodges
Over cool basements of poured concrete.
John Brown’s shadow darkens over Osawatomie’s Honeycombed floors and even then
The citizens learn to say that they believe
In music and laugh.
Eisenhower was born here.
7. Back in Kansas After Leaving Thirteen Times
Had washed my face in cold water those many mornings
Waking beside bay windows, sun playing xylophone in the slatted blinds.
Hot rivalries among the white houses, on Third Street, on Delaware,
Silos lift wheat heavenward over the houses,
Apartments line the river bank, brown Kaw, turgid, flowing backwards.
Dreaming mushrooms on the wet night lawns, grasshoppers choir—
They are singing under the porchboards,
The young straddle the elders wings and gnaw off their wings.
This summer they have come in their thousands, their aborted leaps drum under the porch,
The sound of their rasping is heard at noon.
Grasshopper wars—we stay to watch them who can go no further.
Here among the shadows of the castor beans we light the barbecue pit, in this elm-shaded refuge on John Brown’s bloody ground.
8. The Town
by Rilke, Bly, and WP
In this town the houses stand in rigid plots;
Each looks askance at the next and does not speak.
The turnpike, which the town can never stop,
Runs out into the darkness west and east.
The main street laid by drunken engineers
Leads the old road like a drunk with one stump arm
Past the bolted storefronts stiff with fear,
And the tracks that cross like an abdominal scar.
The town is but a stopping-over place,
But this the town does not like to be told;
Tiny, afraid of the huge surrounding spaces,
The town fears the highway it cannot hold.
Those who leave the town wander a long way
And many don't return, or die on the road.
A variation on Robert Bly’s translation of Rilke’s “In diesem Dorfe steht das lezte Haus”
9. Hatred of Men With Black Hair
by Robert Bly
I hear spokesmen praising Tshombe, and the Portuguese
In Angola. These are the men who skinned Little Crow!
We are all their sons, skulking
In back rooms, selling nails with trembling hands!
We fear every person on earth with black hair.
We send teams to overthrow Chief Joseph’s government.
We train natives to kill the President with blowdarts.
We have men loosening the nails on Noah’s ark.
State Department men float in the heavy jellies near the bottom
Like exhausted crustaceans, like squids who are confused,
Sending out beams of black light to the open sea.
Each fights his fraternal feeling for the great landlords.
We have violet rays that light up the jungle at night, showing us
The friendly populations; and we teach the children of ritual,
The forest children, to overcome their longing for life, and we send
Sparks of black light that fit the holes in the generals’ eyes.
Underneath all the cement of the Pentagon
There is a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow:
Preserved from a trail of blood that once led away
From the stockade, over the snow, the trail now lost.
---1973
10. The Dean’s Daughter (1942-1986)
by WP
Barbara Louise Balfour, Dean of Men's daughter
her dad was cock of the university walk
professor of cellular biology
ombudsman, civic minded activist,
a duck hunter hidden in his blind.
He twice won the Hope Award
"but I never had any," Barbara would say,
"not from him nor from my mother."
As a faculty wife Mrs. Balfour sought self-betterment
auditing graduate courses in the English Department
including one on the 20th century American novel
the prof kept talking about alienation
till one day Mrs. Balfour raised her hand and spoke,
"I don't understand why all these characters have to be lonely.
with all the many clubs and societies they could join."
I thought then of you, Barbara Louise,
alone with the alone, unjoined, unappeased.
Split-brained Barbara went back into asylum.
"I don't have to live like this," she said.
"Crafty Barbara acted sane," she’d tell me,
“they let her out of her cell, a few days later she was dead."
A decade later her prophesy came true.
Daddy and Mama were Barb’s two faces—
the gifted girl who wrestled with The Faerie Queene
and the unclubbable soul who couldn’t fathom people.
Where are you tonight, sweet Louise
as I visit the white ashes they made of you.
“I’m a woman made of paper,” you used to say—
the ones you wrote, the ones you read
the one they’d stamp when you were dead.
Did you ignite paper-like at Fahrenheit
451 in the roar of that crematorium?
Daddy’s duckling did herself in, a shot in the head
and now she belongs to us all in memoriam.
Poundso and Puskcat 1972
Baddso and Jack Pack
Sources
Holmes, Richard. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. USA: Viking Books, 1985.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957; Penguin twentieth-century classics, introduction by Ann Charters, 1991.
Pounds, Wayne. The Lonesome Death of Billy Grayson: Killings in Early-Day Lincoln County Oklahoma. 2nd edition. Kindle, 2017.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Travels with a Donkey in the CĂ©vennes. 1879; London: Century Publishing Co., 1985. Consulted at archive.org.
Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam, 1968.
Digital
Ginsberg, Allen. “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” https://web.archive.org/web/20120224193101/http://wings.buffalo.edu/cas/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/377/Wichita_Vortex.html. Accessed July 2025.
McCool, John H. “Cause for Concern.” https://union.ku.edu/vietnam-era. 18 Nov. 1971. McCool includes an omnibus note: “For wealth of documents pertaining to all aspects the Vietnam Memorial, see the KU Vietnam Memorial boxes, University Archives, 4th Floor, Spencer Research Library. Of particular interest are the following news clippings and university publications: Kansas Alumni (January 1985), (September 1986) and (April 1998), pp. 3, 8-23. The University Daily Kansan: February 8, 1984, pp. 1,5; October 17, 1984, pp. 1,5; May 2, 1985, p. 1; November 12, 1985, p. 6; November 14, 1985, pp. 1,5; June 4, 1986, p. 1. Lawrence Journal-World: November 12, 1985, pp. 1,8; May 2, 1986; May 21, 1986; May 26, 1986, p. 1, 9; and April 26, 1998. See also, Kansas City Star, July 8, 1986; Kansas City Times, May 26, 1986, p. B-3; Wichita Eagle Beacon, May 26, 1986, pp. 1C, 4C.” Accessed July 2025.
“Separating the War from the Warriors.” KU Vietnam Memorial. https://union.ku.edu/separating-war-warriors. Accessed July 2025.
“Thousands marched 40 years ago at KU to protest Vietnam conflict.” https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/oct/15/thousands-marched-40-years-ago-ku-protest-vietnam/. Accessed July 2025.
“Union Firebombing.” https://union.ku.edu/union-firebombing. Accessed July 2025.
“Vietnam War.” KU Memorial Unions. https://union.ku.edu/vietnam-war. Accessed July 2025.
“Wichita Vortex Sutra.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_Vortex_Sutra. Accessed July 2025.
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