Blue Highways (29 page)

Escalante’s struggles gave perspective to the easy passage I’d enjoyed across six thousand miles of America. Other than weather, some bad road, and a few zealous police, my difficulties had been only those of mind. In light of what was about to happen, my guilt over easy transit proved ironic.

I went up an enormous geologic upheaval called the Kaibab Plateau; with startling swiftness, the small desert bushes changed to immense conifers as the Kaibab forest deepened: ponderosa, fir, spruce. At six thousand feet, the temperature was sixty: a drop of thirty degrees in ten miles. On the north edge of the forest, the highway made a long gliding descent off the plateau into Utah. Here lay Kane and Garfield counties, a place of multicolored rock and baroque stone columns and, under it all, the largest unexploited coalfield in the country. A land certain one day to be fought over.

At dusk I considered going into the Coral Sand Dunes for the night, but I’d had enough warmth and desert for a while, so I pushed north toward Cedar Breaks in the severe and beautiful Markagunt Plateau. The cool would refresh me. Sporadic splats of rain, not enough to pay attention to, hit the windshield. I turned onto Utah 14, the cross-mountain road to Cedar City. In the dim light of a mountainous sky, I could just make out a large sign:

ELEVATION 10,000 FEET

ROAD MAY BE IMPASSIBLE

DURING WINTER MONTHS.

So? It was nearly May. The rain popped, then stopped, popped and stopped. The incline became steeper and light rain fell steadily, rolling red desert dust off the roof; I hadn’t hit showers since east Texas. It was good. The pleasant cool turned to cold, and I switched on the heater. The headlights glared off snowbanks edging closer to the highway as it climbed, and the rain became sleet. That’s when I began thinking I might have made a little miscalculation. I looked for a place to turn around, but there was only narrow, twisted road. The sleet got heavier, and the headlights were cutting only thirty feet into it. Maybe I could drive above and out of the storm. At eight thousand feet, the wind came up—a rough, nasty wind that bullied me about the slick road. Lear, daring the storm to “strike flat the thick rotundity of the world,” cries, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” And that’s just what they did.

A loud, sulphurous blast of thunder rattled the little truck, then another, and one more. Never had I seen lightning or heard thunder in a snowstorm. Although there were no signs, the map showed a campground near the summit. It would be suicide to stop, and maybe the same to go on. The wind pushed on Ghost Dancing so, I was afraid of getting blown over the invisible edge. Had not the falling snow taken away my vision, I might have needed a blindfold like the ones medieval travelers wore to blunt their terror of crossing the Alps. A rule of the blue road: Be careful going in search of adventure—it’s ridiculously easy to find.

Then I was on the top, ten thousand feet up. UP. The wind was horrendous. Utah 14 now cut through snowbanks higher than the truck. At the junction with route 143, a sign pointed north toward Cedar Breaks campground. I relaxed. I was going to live. I puffed up at having beaten the mountain.

Two hundred yards up 143, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I got out and walked to it as the raving wind whipped my pantlegs and pulled my hair on end. I couldn’t believe it. There it was, the striped centerline, glowing through the sleet, disappearing under a seven-foot snowbank. Blocked.

Back to the truck. My heart dropped like a stone through new snow. There had to be a mistake. I mean, this wasn’t 1776. The days of Escalante were gone. But the only mistake was my judgment. I was stopped on state 143, and 143 lay under winter ice.

I turned up the heater to blast level, went to the back, and wrapped a blanket around the sleeping bag. I undressed fast and got into a sweatsuit, two pairs of socks, my old Navy-issue watch cap, a pair of gloves. When I cut the engine, snow already had covered the windshield. Only a quarter tank of gas. While the warmth lasted, I hurried into the bag and pulled back the curtain to watch the fulminous clouds blast the mountain. That sky was bent on having a storm, and I was in for a drubbing.

At any particular moment in a man’s life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he’s being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that’s a fulfilling notion. But if he’s in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.

A loud racketing of hail fell on the steel box, and the wind seemed to have hands, it shook the Ghost so relentlessly. Lightning tried to outdo thunder in scaring me. So did those things scare me? No. Not
those
things. It was something else. I was certain of a bear attack. That’s what scared me.

Lightning strikes the earth about eight million times each day and kills a hundred and fifty Americans every year. I don’t know how many die from exposure and hypothermia, but it must be at least a comparable number. As for bears eating people who sleep inside steel trucks, I haven’t been able to find that figure. It made no sense to fear a bear coming out of hibernation in such weather to attack a truck. Yet I lay a long time, waiting for the beast, shaggy and immense, to claw through the metal, its hot breath on my head, to devour me like a gumdrop and roll the van over the edge.

Perhaps fatigue or strain prevented me from worrying about the real fear; perhaps some mechanism of mind hid the true and inescapable threat. Whatever it was, it finally came to me that I was crazy. Maybe I was already freezing to death. Maybe this was the way it happened. Black Elk prays for the Grandfather Spirit to help him face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet. Whitman too:

O to be self-balanced for contingencies,

To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

I wondered how long I might have to stay in the Breaks before I could drive down. The cold didn’t worry me much: I had insulated the rig myself and slept in it once when the windchill was thirty-six below. I figured to survive if I didn’t have to stay on top too long. Why hadn’t I listened to friends who advised carrying a CB? The headline showed darkly: F
ROZEN
M
AN
F
OUND IN
A
VALANCHE
. The whole night I slept and woke, slept and woke, while the hail fell like iron shot, and thunder slammed around, and lightning seared the ice.

D
IRTY
and hard, the morning light could have been old concrete. Twenty-nine degrees inside. I tried to figure a way to drive down the mountain without leaving the sleeping bag. I was stiff—not from the cold so much as from having slept coiled like a grub. Creaking open and pinching toes and fingers to check for frostbite, I counted to ten (twice) before shouting and leaping for my clothes. Shouting distracts the agony. Underwear, trousers, and shirt so cold they felt wet.

I went outside to relieve myself. In the snow, with the hot stream, I spelled out
alive
. Then to work chipping clear the windows. Somewhere off this mountain, people still lay warm in their blankets and not yet ready to get up to a hot breakfast. So what if they spent the day selling imprinted ballpoint pens? Weren’t they down off mountains?

Down. I had to try it. And down it was, Utah 14 a complication of twists and drops descending the west side more precipitately than the east. A good thing I hadn’t attempted it in the dark. After a mile, snow on the pavement became slush, then water, and finally at six thousand feet, dry and sunny blacktop.

Cedar City, a tidy Mormon town, lay at the base of the mountains on the edge of the Escalante Desert. Ah, desert! I pulled in for gas, snow still melting off my rig. “See you spent the night in the Breaks,” the attendant said. “You people never believe the sign at the bottom.”

“I believed, but it said something about winter months. May isn’t winter.”

“It is up there. You Easterners just don’t know what a mountain is.”

I didn’t say anything, but I knew what a mountain was: a high pile of windy rocks with its own weather.

In the cafeteria of Southern Utah State College, I bought a breakfast of scrambled eggs, pancakes, bacon, oatmeal, grapefruit, orange juice, milk, and a cinnamon roll. A celebration of being alive. I was full of victory.

Across the table sat an Indian student named Kendrick Fritz, who was studying chemistry and wanted to become a physician. He had grown up in Moenkopi, Arizona, just across the highway from Tuba City. I said, “Are you Navajo or Hopi?”

“Hopi. You can tell by my size. Hopis are smaller than Navajos.”

His voice was gentle, his words considered, and smile timid. He seemed open to questions. “Fritz doesn’t sound like a Hopi name.”

“My father took it when he was in the Army in the Second World War. Hopis usually have Anglo first names and long Hopi last names that are hard for other people to pronounce.”

I told him of my difficulty in rousing a conversation in Tuba City. He said, “I can’t speak for Navajos about prejudice, but I know Hopis who believe we survived Spaniards, missionaries, a thousand years of other Indians, even the BIA. But tourists?” He smiled. “Smallpox would be better.”

“Do you—yourself—think most whites are prejudiced against Indians?”

“About fifty-fifty. Half show contempt because they saw a drunk squaw at the Circle K. Another half think we’re noble savages—they may be worse because if an Indian makes a mistake they hate him for being human. Who wants to be somebody’s ideal myth?”

“My grandfather used to say the Big Vision made the Indian, but the white man invented him.”

“Relations are okay here, but I wouldn’t call them good, and I’m not one to go around looking for prejudice. I try not to.”

“Maybe you’re more tolerant of Anglo ways than some others.”

“Could be. I mean, I
am
studying to be a doctor and not a medicine man. But I’m no apple Indian—red outside and white underneath. I lived up in Brigham City, Utah, when I went to the Intermountain School run by the BIA. It was too easy though. Too much time to goof around. So I switched to Box Elder—that’s a public school. I learned there. And I lived in Dallas a few months. What I’m saying is that I’ve lived on Hopi land and I’ve lived away. I hear Indians talk about being red all the way through criticizing others for acting like Anglos, and all the time they’re sitting in a pickup at a drive-in. But don’t tell them to trade the truck for a horse.”

“The Spanish brought the horse.”

He nodded. “To me, being Indian means being responsible to my people. Helping with the best tools. Who invented penicillin doesn’t matter.”

“What happens after you finish school?”

“I used to want out of Tuba, but since I’ve been away, I’ve come to see how our land really is our Sacred Circle—it’s our strength. Now, I want to go back and practice general medicine. At the Indian hospital in Tuba where my mother and sister are nurse’s aides, there aren’t any Indian M.D.’s, and that’s no good. I don’t respect people who don’t help themselves. Hopi land is no place to make big money, but I’m not interested anyway.”

“You don’t use the word
reservation
.”

“We don’t think of it as a reservation since we were never ordered there. We found it through Hopi prophecies. We’re unusual because we’ve always held onto our original land—most of it anyway. One time my grandfather pointed out the old boundaries to me. We were way up on a mesa. I’ve forgotten what they are except for the San Francisco Peaks. But in the last eighty years, the government’s given a lot of our land to Navajos, and now we’re in a hard spot—eight thousand Hopis are surrounded and outnumbered twenty-five to one. I don’t begrudge the Navajo anything, but I think Hopis should be in on making the decisions. Maybe you know that Congress didn’t even admit Indians to citizenship until about nineteen twenty. Incredible—live someplace a thousand years and then find out you’re a foreigner.”

“I know an Osage who says, ‘Don’t Americanize me and I won’t Americanize you.’ He means everybody in the country came from someplace else.”

“Hopi legends are full of migrations.”

“Will other Hopis be suspicious of you when you go home as a doctor?”

“Some might be, but not my family. But for a lot of Hopis, the worst thing to call a man is
kahopi,
‘not Hopi.’ Nowadays, though, we all have to choose either the new ways or the Hopi way, and it’s split up whole villages. A lot of us try to find the best in both places. We’ve always learned from other people. If we hadn’t, we’d be extinct like some other tribes.”

“Medicine’s a pretty good survival technique.”

“Sure, but I also like Jethro Tull and the Moody Blues. That’s not survival.”

“Is the old religion a survival technique?”

“If you live it.”

“Do you?”

“Most Hopis follow our religion, at least in some ways, because it reminds us who we are and it’s part of the land. I’ll tell you, in the rainy season when the desert turns green, it’s beautiful there. The land is medicine too.”

“If you don’t mind telling me, what’s the religion like?”

“Like any religion in one way—different clans believe different things.”

“There must be something they all share, something common.”

“That’s hard to say.”

“Could you try?”

He thought a moment. “Maybe the idea of harmony. And the way a Hopi prays. A good life, a harmonious life, is a prayer. We don’t just pray for ourselves, we pray for all things. We’re famous for the Snake Dances, but a lot of people don’t realize those ceremonies are prayers for rain and crops, prayers for life. We also pray for rain by sitting and thinking about rain. We sit and picture wet things like streams and clouds. It’s sitting in pictures.”

He picked up his tray to go. “I could give you a taste of the old Hopi Way. But maybe you’re too full after that breakfast. You always eat so much?”