Blue Highways (27 page)

I suspected that the Boss embraced one crisis after another because they gave him significance, something like tragic stature. He had so lost belief in a world outside himself that, without crisis, he had nothing worth talking about. On and on, the tolling of words revealed his expertise in living a life that baffled him.

Occasionally, when the fire ignited a drop of resin, our twin shadows, absurdly big, would stretch to the edge of night, then shrink back with the dying flame. He noticed my attention wandering and asked a question that flabbergasted me: “So you say you’re just driving through?” He wasn’t that drunk. Maybe he wasn’t drunk at all; maybe he just never quit thinking of himself long enough to listen. He made me tired.

“That’s right,” I said. “Just driving through to Utica.”

I wanted to slap him around, wake him up. He had the capacity to see but not the guts; he mucked in the drivel of his life, afraid to go into the subterranean currents that dragged him about. A man concealed in his own life, scared to move, holding himself too close, petting himself too much.

“Time for some sleep,” I said and yawned big to prove it.

He got to his feet, leaning a little this way and that. Then he delivered a lecture. I think he’d read too much Plutarch. After a sentence or two, I flipped on the tape recorder. Here is the essence:

“In eighteen eighty-five, the government of these United States took measures to prevent Apaches from manufacturing tiswin. Tiswin is a beer-like intoxicant Apaches had made for centuries. The great Chiricahua Apache, Goyathlay—whose name translates as One-Who-Yawns—became angered at this additional infringement on Indian traditions and conducted several retaliatory raids here and in Mexico against the ancient enemy. One notes the government had appropriated most of the hunting grounds of the Chiricahua, forcing them to depend on the Army for sustenance, although the Army seldom gave Apaches their full allotment and often made them—even children, the aged, and infirm—walk twenty miles to get rations. Further, unscrupulous white men, who wanted Apache land for mines and ranches, incited the Chiricahua by telling them they were marked for extermination. They knew the subsequent unrest would give the Army an excuse to drive them off the reservation. Intelligent commanders like General George Crook saw this, but Washington rarely listened because the Congress knew all it needed to know about blood-thirsty Apaches. President Grover Cleveland based his judgment on headlines and yellow journalism and wanted Goyathlay hanged. General Crook understood that Goyathlay fought not out of hatred but out of fear and love for his heritage and—what’s more—having nothing of significance to do any longer. This is all a footnote.

“After numerous raids and subsequent surrenders, Goyathlay’s final surrender brought him incarceration in damp Florida, where so many desert Indians died. The chief saw the old wars were a losing game. A willingness to die no longer made a man free—it made him stupid. By fighting so hard for their old life, the Chiricahua forced the extinction of their ancient ways. There’s the key. But the reactionary Goyathlay accepted some of the new ways after he was moved to a reservation in Oklahoma, where he became a successful farmer, wrote his autobiography, and joined the Dutch Reformed Church—the church which prays, ‘All my works are as dirty rags in the sight of the Lord.’

“But I’ve gotten ahead of my story. After Goyathlay’s many raids in this desert, he often escaped to these mountains—to this very canyon, a sacred place where Apaches heard voices of the dead. He camped by and drank from this very stream. Like the outlaws of Tombstone who also hid here, Goyathlay was a desperado—that is to say, a desperate man.”

He stopped speaking. “Aren’t we all?” I said and yawned again.

“The desperado who died aged and successful although deprived of his old life and homeland, One-Who-Yawns by name, you may have heard of.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Think again, my countryman. The United States Army called him Geronimo. You see, there is hope for us all.”

T
HE
morning was the kind of day that makes a man doubt the reality of death: warm sun, cool air, clear water, bird notes flying out of the hardwoods like sparks from an anvil. I washed and got moving, heading up canyon. After four miles, the pavement stopped and the road turned to a horrendously stony slope that twisted sharply up into the mountain forest. A sign:
IMPASSABLE TO TRAILERS.
An intriguing road. Whitman writes:

O highway I travel, do you say to me
Do not leave me?

Do you say
Venture not—if you leave me you are lost?

Do you say
I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me?

O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you.

Ready for anything that morning, that’s what I got.

Onion Saddle Road, after I was committed to it, narrowed to a single rutted lane affording no place to turn around; if I met somebody, one of us would have to back down. The higher I went, the more that idea unnerved me—the road was bad enough driving forward. The compass swung from point to point, and within any five minutes it had touched each of the three hundred sixty degrees. The clutch started pushing back, and ruts and craters and rocks threw the steering wheel into nasty jerks that wrenched to the spine. I understood why, the day before, I’d thought there could be no road over the Chiricahuas: there wasn’t. No wonder desperadoes hid in this inaccessibility.

Higher and higher the road, hanging precariously to the mountain edge as if tacked on; the truck swung around the sharp turns, and all I could see was sky and cloud. It was like flying. Then, far above the southern Arizona desert, snow lay in shaded depressions. Finally, at eight thousand feet, I came to what must have been the summit. Pines were bigger on the western slope, but the descent was no less rocky or steep. And it went on and on. I thought: Why couldn’t this curse of a road just be a nightmare? Why couldn’t I wake to find myself groggy and warm, curled like a snail in my sleeping bag?

No road signs, no indications that I was coming off the mountain; maybe I was on the way to a dead end. I could only trust in the blue-highway maxim: “I can’t take any more” comes just before “I don’t give a damn.” Let the caring snap, let it break all to hell. Caring breaks before the man if he can only wait it out.

Sure enough, the single lane became two, the dirt macadam, and Pinery Canyon led out to Arizona 186, a crooked highway that dipped into arroyos rather than bridging them; but it was smooth beyond measure, and Ghost Dancing drove itself. I had crossed. No accomplishment at all, but it seemed like one. In the side mirror the powdery visage of a man embraced by the desert; I was wearing a layer of the Chiricahuas. As for Paradise, I never found it.

The towns were Dos Cabezas, a clutch of houses under worn twin peaks like skulls, and Willcox, clean and orderly. Then another road choice: two days of rock and ruts through the Little Dragoon Mountains or I-10. It was Friday, and I wanted company. I weakened and took the well-beaten and undenied public road northwest toward Phoenix, where I hoped to find a man who knew my boyhood almost as well as I did.

The interstate, after the mountains, came as relief. I sat back. My encounter of the night before had been on my mind since morning. The Boss of the Plains bothered me—I didn’t know why. Things outside himself he found banal and not worth his attention. Was that it? An empty man full of himself? Unlike other people of common coin I’d met along the road, he was separate rather than distinct; yet, unlike his, their commonality sang. They seemed parts of a whole. After traveling nineteenth-century America, de Tocqueville came to believe one result of democracy was a concentration of each man’s attention upon himself.

The highway rose slowly for miles then dropped into wacky Texas Canyon, an abrupt and peculiar piling of boulders, which looked as if hoisted into strange angles and points of balance. Nature in a zany mood had stacked up the rounded rocks in whimsical and impossible ways, trying out new principles of design, experimenting with old laws of gravity, putting theorems of the physicists to the test. But beyond Texas Canyon, the terrain was once more logical and mundane right angles, everything flat or straight up.

I was thinking of Cave Creek again. The beautiful place seemed shadowy as if the Boss cast a murk. Black Elk says men get lost in the darkness of their own eyes, and indeed, the Boss had found a thousand ways to protect himself from a real confrontation with himself. And more: he listened for despair, then accorded himself with it. “Hell under the skull bones,” Whitman calls it.

In Tucson, I stopped for gas along a multilane called Miracle Mile (they love that appellation in the West) congested like an asthmatic bronchial tube; then back to the highway. By last light, I came into the city named after the bird forever reborn from the ashes of what it has been.

I
DON’T
suppose that saguaros mean to give comic relief to the otherwise solemn face of the desert, but they do. Standing on the friable slopes they are quite persnickety about, saguaros mimic men as they salute, bow, dance, raise arms to wave, and grin with faces carved in by woodpeckers. Older plants, having survived odds against their reaching maturity of sixty million to one, have every right to smile.

The saguaro is ninety percent water, and a big, two-hundred-year-old cactus may hold a ton of it—a two-year supply. With this weight, a plant that begins to lean is soon on the ground; one theory now says that the arms, which begin sprouting only after forty or fifty years when the cactus has some height, are counterweights to keep the plant erect.

The Monday I drove northeast out of Phoenix, saguaros were in bloom—comparatively small, greenish-white blossoms perched on top of the trunks like undersized Easter bonnets; at night, long-nosed bats came to pollinate them. But by day, cactus wrens, birds of daring aerial skill, put on the show as they made kamikaze dives between toothpick-size thorns into nest cavities, where they were safe from everything except the incredible ascents over the spines by black racers in search of eggs the snakes would swallow whole.

It was hot. The only shade along Arizona 87 lay under the bottomsides of rocks; the desert gives space then closes it up with heat. To the east, in profile, rose the Superstition Mountains, an evil place, Pima and Maricopa Indians say, which brings on diabolic possession to those who enter. Somewhere among the granite and greasewood was the Lost Dutchman gold mine, important not for whatever cache it might hide as for providing a white dream.

North of the Sycamore River, saguaro, ocotillo, paloverde, and cholla surrendered the hills to pads of prickly pear the size of a man’s head. The road climbed and the temperature dropped. At Payson, a mile high on the northern slope of the Mazatzal Mountains, I had to pull on a jacket.

Settlers once ran into Payson for protection from marauding Apaches; after the Apache let things calm down, citizens tried to liven them up again by holding rodeos in the main street. Now, streets paved, Payson lay quiet but for the whine of sawmills releasing the sweet scent of cut timber.

I stopped at an old log hotel to quench a desert thirst. A sign on the door:
NO LIVE ANIMALS ALLOWED.
I guess you could bring in all the dead ones you wanted. A woman shouted, “Ain’t servin’ now.” Her unmoving eyes, heavy as if cast from lead, watched suspiciously for a live badger under my jacket or a weasel up my pantleg.

“This is a fine old hotel,” I said. She ignored me. “Do you mind if I look at your big map?” She shrugged and moved away, safe from any live animal attack. I was hunting a place to go next. Someone had marked the Hopi Reservation to the north in red. Why not? As I left, I asked where I could water my lizard. She ignored that too.

Highway 260, winding through the pine forests of central Arizona, let the mountains be boss as it followed whatever avenues they left open, crossing ridges only when necessary, slipping unobtrusively on narrow spans over streams of rounded boulders. But when 260 reached the massive escarpment called the Mogollon Rim, it had to challenge geography and climb the face.

I shifted to low, and Ghost Dancing pulled hard. A man with a dusty, leathery face creased like an old boot strained on a bicycle—the old style with fat tires. I called a hello, he said nothing. At the summit, I waited to see whether he would make the ascent. Far below lay two cars, crumpled wads. Through the clear air I could count nine ranges of mountains, each successively grayer in a way reminiscent of old Chinese woodblock prints. The Mogollon was a spectacular place; the more so because I had not been anesthetized to it by endless Kodachromes. When the cyclist passed, I called out, “Bravo!” but he acknowledged nothing. I would have liked to talk to a man who, while his contemporaries were consolidating their little empires, rides up the Mogollon Rim on a child’s toy. Surely he knew something about desperate men.