Blue Highways (33 page)

Margaret Chealander came out of the kitchen. She had moved to the station from San Francisco with her husband after he retired from General Motors. She said, “We were living here when my husband died, but I’ve never wanted to move. Strange how this god-forsaken place gets in you. In the summer it’s a hundred and ten; in winter it’s fifteen below. Telephone lines get blown down regularly—or they did before the microwave relay came in. When the lines went down, we were cut off, and I mean
off
. But you get to know yourself out here—you have to. And you get to know the others around because we all have to look after each other. Out here, sooner or later, all of us need help. Look out for yourself, look out for each other. The law of the land.” She came around the counter to sit down. “I think it’s the distance between us that keeps us close. Everything here is important because there isn’t much of it—except weather and dust. Once you see that, you’re not lonely.”

13. Margaret and Laurie Chealander in Frenchman, Nevada

“Loneliness is blindness?”

“We’ve got bar tabs three years old,” Laurie said. “They’ll get paid someday. Can’t afford to write anybody off. Last year a man—seventy-two and with an artificial leg—he came in a little oiled and then got tighter than Dick’s hatband. When he tried to get to his car, I told him I was going to pull his leg off. He griped but spent the night in the motel.”

“The isolation—” I was starting to say.

“You like it or you don’t,” Laurie said. “Callie, our daughter, is a fourth-generation Nevadan. That’s something in a state where most people are from somewhere else. I wanted to have the baby on the pool table, but nobody would listen. So we had to make a ninety-mile-an-hour drive to Reno at three in the morning. God, what a ride!”

“On the pool table?”

“I don’t think anyone’s ever been born in Frenchman in a hundred and thirty-five years.”

“A pool table on a bombing range?”

“It would have been something for her to remember.”

T
HE
argument whether or not Sand Mountain had crossed the highway made more sense when I saw the thing—a single massive mound of tawny sand, a wavy hump between two larger ridges of sage and rock. It was of such size that, while it wasn’t perhaps big enough to be a mountain by everybody’s definition, it was surely more than a dune. Nevadans once called it “Singing Sand Mountain” because of the pleasant hum in the blowing sands, but no one has heard the mountain since off-road vehicles from California took it over.

I crossed Eight Mile Flat, a stretch of alkali crusts and shallow winter run-off where a machine scraped up salt crystals. It was near here in 1907, they tell, that a cafe owner, preparing broilers for supper, found two chicken craws laden with golden gravel; he at once butchered all his yard hens and found more nuggets. Because the flat contained no gold, he began looking for the source of the chickens and learned they had been raised on four separate farms before he bought them. Although the search lasted years, the Chicken Craw Goldrush died as it was born.

I stopped for a beer in Salt Wells at a place called Maxi’s. If there was more to Salt Wells than that entirely Chinese-red building, I didn’t see it. An ornamental wrought-iron fence covered the front; the gate was locked. Turning to leave, I noticed an arrow pointing to a button. Push me. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I pushed, a dark face peered from a circle scraped on a window (painted red too), the gate clicked open, and I went inside where walls, ceiling, curtains, and lightbulbs were bright red. A sign:

DANCE WITH THE LADIES

50¢

THREE FOR A DOLLAR.

Below was a sticker,
GO NAVY
. A saloon as peculiar as the desert. That’s when I realized it wasn’t a desert saloon. It was a desert cathouse. Bold and plain, directly on U.S. 50, and flagrantly red from top to bottom.

Everyone—two Indians, two Negroes, a Chicano, and the bartender—all of them watched me. I ambled to the bar as if I’d known all along. Mirror decals showed the management accepted Visa, Mastercharge, American Express.

“Hey, Joe, what’s your name?” she asked. I don’t know where she came from.

“Al,” I said.

“How about a party, Al?”

“What’s
your
name?”

“Tiffany. How do you like it, Al?”

“It’s a fine name.”

“Not the name, Al baby—your party. How do you like your party? Hot?”

Tiffany, with all due respect, was one of the most facially unfavored women I’d ever seen. Her features would have been woeful on a man, but on a woman who earned her way by sexual attraction they were calamitous. She was a good dose of saltpeter. Yet nature, not withholding everything, had recompensed her with two impressive advertisements that she rested flat on the bar. “How about a dance with a lady? Three for a dollar.”

“Dances or ladies?”

“Don’t be cute, Allie. Just name your pleasures.”

Allie it was now. “I only stopped in to use the phone. You know, engine trouble with my rig. Got to report in to the dispatcher.”

She looked at me sympathetically. “Are you gay, honey? Tiffany’s helped a hundred of your kind. Your problems show up like the honeymoon virgin.”

I think that woman must have been a terrific salesperson. She had backed me into a dialectical corner with three or four sentences and left me only two escapes: admit to deviance or prove a capacity to perform at her standard. The bartender edged over, insinuating a little pressure. Tiffany turned on her stool and one of her portions on the bar followed. Another dancing lady came in. She was quite pretty.

“That’s Faith,” Tiffany said. “Men prefer her. Maybe you would too. I’m used to it. I mean, it’s no surprise to Tiffany.” Another tack coming. “I just hope if you have a little girl, she’s beautiful, because you men make it so tough on anybody who doesn’t look like Debby Boone.”

“Debby—I mean Tiffany—I’ll tell you the truth. I walked in here not realizing it was—it was a place.”

“Sometimes us girls call it a whorehouse.”

“Right. When I finish my beer I’ll have to get back on the road.”

“So you’re in a whorehouse. Too good for woman’s company, Mister Allen?”

The woman had the tactical mind of General Patton. She blocked me at every move. The bartender leaned in. “Good buddy, let Miss Tiffany help you. She’s cured worse cases than yours. Why do you think she’s called Tiffany? Pure class. Twenty-four carat.”

“My case is okay. I just don’t have the money.”

“Look, Joe,” Tiffany said. “You talk money? It’s costing me to sit here trying to give a good time. You think I like crapping around with tweeties?”

I drank my beer and took my case down the road, through the irrigated plain at Fallon, into hills, along the Truckee River, under a shelf of glowing clouds above downtown Reno, past signs offering
CANDLE LIGHT WEDDINGS—NO WAITING—FREE WITNESSES
. I stopped near the University of Nevada and put my case to bed. The geologist was right. It was one crazy state.

T
HE
next morning on the desert I was awakened by the squeal of seagulls. I looked out the window. I should have been used to the vagaries of the desert, but I wasn’t. Sure enough, a pair of gulls overhead.

While the radio played, I washed up. The big news that Sunday in Reno was of a seventy-three-year-old Canadian who had been coming to the casinos three times a year for twenty years. She had met with no success until last night when she won $183,000.

At breakfast in the university cafeteria, I sat by a student who, even with the orthodontics, had a face of ill-matched features. I mentioned the woman’s win. “Rigged,” he scoffed. “It’s too good: a grandmother returning faithfully to Mecca for years, then finally hitting the big score.”

“Why rig a loss?”

“Cheapest and best advertising casinos can get. It’ll go out on the wire services and be reported as news. It’s believable, and it’ll bring in new suckers and keep the fixtures hanging around. Makes casinos look good.”

“The lady didn’t really win?”

“She probably won and still doesn’t know how she hit a jackpot. The house had her checked out—knew how long she’d been coming here. I’ll bet she’s got a face sweet as a sugar bun. Of all the greasy scumbags down there every night, did you ever see any of them big winners?”

I headed north out of Reno, crossed into California at an intersection once called Hallelujah Junction because it meant arrival in Eurekaland, then turned west on state 70. At Beckwourth Pass, only a mile high and the lowest route over the Sierra Nevadas, I hardly knew I’d crossed anything. But the mountains rose again on the other side, and the day became a dim, sodden thing, damp without rain. Dismal. The weather saturated me, and it may have provoked a dark fit of musing I fell into.

While I had failed to put any fragments of the journey into a whole, I did have a vague sense of mentally moving away from some things and toward others. But in the Sierra gloom, even that notion seemed an illusion produced by motion down a highway, as if the road moved through me in a continual coming and going that was, in the long run, stasis. I was on a Ferris wheel, moving along, seeing far horizons, coming close to earth, rising again, moving, moving, but all the time turning in the same orbit. Black Elk says, “Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.” A hope.

Missourians sometimes speak of a place called Hacklebarney: a nonexistent town you try to get to that is forever just around the next curve or just over the next hill, a town you believe in but never get to. Maybe that’s enlightenment—always a little ahead of perception.

Hindus represent their god of destruction, Shiva, by the yoni-lingam symbols of regeneration to suggest the cyclical movement of coming into and going from being that never ceases. Even if a man resists belief in the fixity of things, even if he discredits the scope of human understanding, even if he sees a hint of metaphysics between “cosmic” and “comic” (Yiddish proverb: Man thinks and God laughs), he still longs to arrive at a place of clarity.

Just outside Portola, I crossed Humbug Creek. I didn’t believe it. Nothing that apropos happens in real life. I stopped and walked back to the brook to see whether I saw what I thought I saw. Humbug Creek. I could almost hear the laughter from on high.

The road made a long turn and headed northwest up a deep river valley of conifers where slab-pine houses with tin roofs leaked a blue vapor of wood smoke from stovepipe chimneys into the mist. Apple trees were in blossom, but the leaves, still closed, waited for the right slant of vernal light. It came to me that I didn’t recognize the coming of spring in this mountain country. At home I could name the season by its angle of light, its color and shadow and sound and scent. But in the valley of the Middle Fork of the Feather River, the light and sound and smells were different.

Quincy was a clean mountain town, empty and quiet but for a church bell. It was Sunday with a vengeance. Sunday in the churches, yes, but also Sunday in the streets, alleys, fields, even in the heart of the pines. Sunday is the day bells toll, the day funny papers come out—and with good reason. While the citizens sat under arched ceilings and spoke with their various gods and saviors, I scuffled with humbug in the Laundromat.

By noon, outfitted with a full set of washed clothes, I went again into the mountains. North of Keddie, the road passed a spring spilling from the side of a broken cliff. I emptied my jugs of city water and filled them with purity from the rocks and drank a pint to clear the pipes, then walked up into the trees to dispel the jounce of miles. The sun, breaking through now and then, cast long slopes of light down the mists, and for a time, the vapors of humbug evaporated.

Route 89 followed the Indian River, a frothing green turbulence, up into higher mountains. For miles, the only bridge across it was a rusty cable chair, the only things visible the river and big firs and pines of the Plumas Forest. When I got to state 36, I had a choice of heading toward the Sacramento Valley farmlands or staying in the mountains. I took the road across Lassen Peak, a sharp ascent that disappeared in clouds. Halfway up, snowflakes the size of nickels dropped out of the cold. Cedar Breaks. Then a sign saying the road was closed for winter. I inched the van back and forth until turned around, all the while cursing a sign not at the bottom of the mountain. Arriving again at the foot of Lassen, I started around it.

Rain fell as I moved toward the valley, but on a ridge road between deep volcanic canyons, the showers stopped and a rainbow arched the highway canyon to canyon. The slopes were strewn with shattered “thunder eggs” ejected from Lassen, a volcano last violently active only sixty years before. I took a road not marked on my map toward Manton. Nowhere was the way straight, but the land it traversed looked like an illustration from a child’s book: a whimsy of rocky shapes, a fancy of spongy bushes, a figment of trees. Two loping deer could have been unicorns, and the fisherman under a bridge a troll. The only reality was that somebody owned the land. At three-hundred-yard intervals, alternating signs hung from barbed wire:
NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE PROPERTY.