Blue Highways (35 page)

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.

The Boss of the Plains had said (after he mentioned his death wish) that his life had come to seem more and more of the same thing, and he called the story of his life
Ten Thousand Mistakes
. It stood to reason. To him a mistake was deviation from preconceived ideas, from standard answers, from wandering off the marked route. To him, change meant error.

Biochemists hold that evolution proceeds by random genetic changes—errors—and that each living thing is an experiment within the continuum of trial and error and temporary success. In nature,
correct
means harmony that breeds survival. Always to demand established routes, habitual ways, then, is to go against the grain of life; that is often the Indian impulse. But to engage in the continuing experiment is to reach for harmony. Hesse writes:

I am an experiment on the part of nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task is to allow this game on the part of the primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine.

Whitman said it too: “A man is a summons and a challenge.”

I had driven through Fall River Mills and McArthur, and I couldn’t remember a thing about them. If I were going off on some blue highway of the mind, I should have pulled over. North of Bieber, on a whim, I followed the road to Lookout. In the high valley lay marshes filled with yellow-headed blackbirds, pintails, cinnamon teals, willets, Canada geese. The highway rose again into another volcanic region. Mount Shasta, sixty miles west, isolated by its hugeness, haloed in clouds, looked like a Hokusai woodcut of Mount Fuji. Perhaps it is the immensity of space around Shasta or the abundance of high peaks in the West that diminishes a mountain of such size and perfection in the American imagination, but in almost any other country, a volcano so big and well-made as Shasta would be a national object of reverence—as in fact it once was to the first men who lived under it.

I never found Lookout. In dry and dusty Tulelake, I bought groceries, then crossed into Oregon, where the Cascades to the west blocked a froth of storm clouds; but for the mountains, I would have been in rain again. A town of only fifteen thousand somehow spread across the entire bottom of a long valley; when I saw the reach of Klamath Falls, I kept going. U.S. 97 was an ordeal of cars and heavy trucks. I don’t know whether Oregonians generally honk horns or whether they had it in for me, but surely they honked. Later, someone said it was part of the “Keep Moving, Stranger” campaign. I turned off into the valley at the first opportunity, an opportunity numbered route 62 that ran to Fort Klamath, a town that began in 1863 as an Army post with the mission of controlling hostile Klamath Indians, who had succeeded for years in keeping settlers out of their rich valley. Keep moving, stranger.

Drawn as always to the glow of neon in the dusk, I stopped at a wooden cafe. No calendars, otherwise perfect. In front sat an Argosy landcruiser (the kind you see in motel parking lots) with an Airstream trailer attached; on top of the Argosy was a motorboat and on the front and back matched mopeds. Often I’d seen the American propensity to take to the highway with as many possessions as a vehicle could carry—that inclination to get away from it all while hauling it all along—but I stood amazed at this achievement of transport called a vacation. Although the Argosy side windows were one-way glass (to look and not get looked at back), in the trailer I saw pine paneling, Swiss cupboards, and a self-cleaning oven. What the owner really wanted was to drive his 3-BR-split-foyer so he wouldn’t have to leave the garage and basement behind.

A man with a napkin tucked to his belt came out of the cafe. A plump woman, lately beyond the Midol years, face fearful like the lady who has just discovered the heartbreak of psoriasis, watched from the cafe.

“What’s up, chum?” the man said.

“I couldn’t believe this outfit. You are one well-prepared family. This little highway’s not really big enough for you, is it?”

He relaxed at what he took as sympathy. “Tried a damned back road.”

We went inside, and I heard the woman whisper, “His type make me nervous.” She’d read about people like me and stared in a bold, contemptuous way she never would have used had she been alone. I tried to check my own irritation. She probably wasn’t a bad sort; she had her good side. Surely she had studied the Gospel According to Heloise and knew by rote the six helpful hints for removing catsup stains.

The food was ordinary, prices high, the waitress unpleasant, and, on top of that, I got reviled by people who could afford life at six-miles-per-gallon. I paid and left. The couple came out, hoisted themselves into the Argosy, and clicked locks against my type. Just above the legal maximum, off they went, those people who took no chances on anything—including their ideas—getting away from them. After all, they read the papers, they watched TV, and they knew America was a dangerous place.

M
OUNT
Mazama may be the greatest nonexistent fourteen-thousand-foot volcano in the country. Actually, it isn’t entirely nonexistent: only the top half is. From the upper end of the Klamath basin, you can still see a massive, symmetrically sloping uplift of the mountain base. Some six thousand years ago, geologists conjecture, the top of Mazama blew off in a series of ruinous eruptions and the sides collapsed into the interior.

Hoping for a place to pass the night, I took a highway up the slope. After a few miles, the road became a groove cut between ten-foot snowbanks, but stars shone, so I drove on to the top. I got out and looked around. A brilliant night. Trusting more than seeing, I walked through a tunnel in a snowdrift to the craterous rim of Mazama. There, far below in the moonlight and edged with ice, lay a two-thousand-foot-deep lake. Klamath braves used to test their courage by climbing down the treacherous scree inside the caldera; if they survived, they bathed in the cold water of the volcano and renewed themselves. Also to this nearly perfect circle of water came medicine men looking for secrets of the Grandfathers. Once a holy place, now Crater Lake is only a famous Oregon tourist attraction.

The next morning, the fog rising from the surface of the lake (the deepest and bluest in America) gave it the look of a hot washtub of Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing. The lodge still lay piled under some of the six hundred inches of annual snowfall here, and the road down the other side of Mazama was not yet cleared, so I went back the way I’d come. Again. Oregon 230 followed a broad mountain stream called Muir Creek. When the morning warmed, I stopped along the banks to fill a basin and wash; after Hat Creek, the water was merely bracing.

Big, yellow-hooded blossoms of the Western skunk cabbage spread over the margins. Although the plant bears some resemblance in shape to the purplish skunk cabbage of the East, it is a relative of the jack-in-the-pulpit, and its flowers are virtually odorless. Looking nothing like cabbage, the leaves were used by Indians to wrap food for cooking; they pulverized the hot, peppery roots into a flour that helped save them (and the Lewis and Clark expedition) from starvation in early spring before other edible plants sprouted. Even today elk and bear, grubbing for the roots, will dig up whole patches of swamp.

I crossed the Cascades on Oregon 58. While the mountains were not particularly high, the road made steep climbs and drops over timbered slopes, and runaway-truck escape ramps looked like ski jumps. On the western side, humidity increased and ferns grew thick as jungle vines. For a time, desert lay behind.

At noon, the journey began a kind of sea change that started when I drove up an old logging road into the recesses of Salt Creek, a stream working hard to beat itself to a lather. In Missouri, when a man’s whereabouts come into question, the people say he’s “gone up Salt Creek.” It’s a place in which you disappear. Maybe I should have taken warning.

After a sandwich, I poked about the woods and turned up a piece of crawling yellow jelly nearly the length of my hand. It was a banana slug, so named because the mollusk looks like a wet, squirming banana. I wanted to photograph it, but a drizzle came on, so I bedded it down in damp leaf litter in a pail. I could drive out of the rain to take its picture.

Then, three things, quite unconnected, began to stack themselves like crystals into a pattern.

FIRST: Waiting on the rain, I studied the map. Where to go? South lay two towns of fine name—Lookingglass and Riddle—but I would have to backtrack sixty wet miles, and already the desert showers had left me prey to the “Oregon blues,” that dissipation of spirit that accompanies the rainy periods when suicides noticeably increase. But Lookingglass! What a name!

SECOND: The town recalled to me a line from Walter de la Mare: “Things are the mind’s mute looking-glass.”

THIRD: Still waiting on the weather, I started reading a book I’d bought in Phoenix,
The Sacred Pipe,
Black Elk’s account of the ancient rites of the Oglala Sioux. In contrast to the good and straight red road of life, Black Elk says, the blue road is the route of “one who is distracted, who is ruled by his senses, and who lives for himself rather than for his people.” I was stunned. Was it racial memory that had urged me to drive seven thousand miles of blue highway, a term I thought I had coined?

That’s when something opened like a windowshade unexpectedly rattling up in a dark room. A sudden, new cast of light. What need for a man to make a trip to Lookingglass, Oregon, when he’d been seeing his own image across the length of the country? De la Mare was right: a mirror may not reflect mind, but a man’s response to landscapes, faces, events does. My skewed vision was that of a man looking at himself by looking at what he looks at. A man watching himself:
that
was the simulacrum on the window in the Nevada desert.

Hadn’t I even made a traveling companion of the great poet of ego, the one who sings of himself, who promises to “effuse egotism and show it underlying all,” who finds the earth his own likeness? Whitman:

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

Money half gone, I’d come up with a bit of epistemological small change.

Not knowing what else to do, I drove off westward. The highway rolled out of the mountains into the basin of the Willamette River, a broad trough with at least as many shades of green as the Irishman can count in Eire. The level and verdant valley should have soothed after so much aridness and stone, so much up and down, but I sat absorbed in my own blue funk.

Old Oregon 99 led into the clean college town of Corvallis. I had no heart for more road. At a grocery I bought six bottles of Blitz beer and six of Buffalo and a hunk of smoked salmon and drove to the campus of Oregon State University and pulled up under a flowering cherry tree of large girth. I walked in the rain, came back in the dark, sat in the truck, and drank a Blitz, then a Buffalo, ate some salmon, and drank another, and one more. I just stared into the morose rain and watched petals slip wetly down the windows.

That’s when I remembered the slug. Too late for pictures now. I turned on the light to release the damn thing. It wasn’t in the pail, and it wasn’t in the box the pail was in; it wasn’t anywhere I could discover. Impossible. With the van tightly sealed, the slug couldn’t have gotten out, but the rain prevented me from emptying the truck.

Listing a little from the beer, I crawled around hunting one of the most primitive and unsightly creatures on earth. Nothing. I looked for the telltale glossy trail. No trail. Whether or not slugs have ears, I didn’t know, but I called to it anyway. Finally, unsteadily, I undressed and went to bed.

Somewhere in Ghost Dancing was a slug—horned, fat, gelatinous with primeval slime, and free to ooze its footless way anywhere while I slept: up walls, onto bunks, over eyelids, across lips. Of all nights for this to happen.

The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one’s self a fool. But this was ridiculous. Never had I figured on this kind of humiliation.

F
OR
two days, two days of drizzle, I waited for the slug to make its move. In western Oregon it can rain a hundred and thirty inches a year, making weather so dismal that even a seadog like Sir Francis Drake complained about it four centuries ago when he sailed here on the
Golden Hind
in search of the Northwest Passage. Those two days I wandered around Corvallis more dispirited than edified by the blue-road perception. I walked and walked. “Nothing,” Homer sings, “is harder on mortal man than wandering.” That’s why the words
travel
and
travail
have a common origin.

During those days, I was drawn to telephones, and on four occasions I dropped in coins and four times I put the receiver back. On the fifth I didn’t.

“Hello?” the Cherokee said.

“It’s me.”

A quiet. “Could I call you back?”

Well, boys, there you have it. Struggling to put it all out of mind, I went to the university library to find how Lookingglass, the town I hadn’t seen, got its name. One theory held that Lookingglass was a local Indian who so admired himself he always carried a small mirror. Well, boys…

Another etymology:
Corvallis,
a Latin combination meaning “in the heart of the valley.” For me, it was more a valley of the heart. No wonder Pascal believed man’s inability to stay quietly in his room is the cause of his unhappiness.

In darkness and rain I left the library. I began fighting the fear that I was about to lose heart utterly and head back. Oh, god, I could feel it coming. The old Navajos, praying for renewal of mental strength, chant, “In the ways of the past, may I walk,” but my chant went the other way around.