Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (24 page)

We all are possessed of knowledge we do not realize we have. This is the accumulation over the years of our subconscious recognitions and appreciations. The information lies there awaiting use, not understood, because we make no demands upon it--although every once in a while a bright idea appears or some unexpected solution to a problem becomes evident.

We must formulate a process for using the subconscious on demand, a simple matter of conditioning. We must learn to pose our problems, supply materials, and let it happen. A writer, or for that matter any artist, is continually making demands upon the subconscious and producing results. The process is there for anyone; it only demands that we make the effort, and by study arrive at the best methods for doing so. It is rather amazing that we spend millions developing transistors and chips that can do only what man can already do within himself. Of course, the transistors and chips can do much work that men need not do, saving enormous amounts of time and energy, but the answer lies within man himself.

A wanderer I had been through most of my early years, and now that I had my own home, my wandering continued, but among books. No longer could I find most of the books I wanted in libraries. I had to seek them out in foreign or secondhand-book stores, which was a pleasure in itself. When seeking books, one always comes upon unexpected treasures or books on subjects that one has never heard of, or heard mentioned only in passing.

Now I knew what I wished to learn and could direct my education with more intelligence.

Slowly I began to place on my shelves the books I wanted. When the shelves were first installed, one workman doubted they would ever be filled, yet a few years later they were crammed with books, filling every available niche.

These were not nice even rows of books in similar bindings but often were battered old veterans moving from the hands of one lover to another, valued for their contents and nothing else. Understand me: I love well-bound books and have many. I love the feel of them, the texture of their bindings and paper, everything about them, but many very excellent books have gone out of print, no longer in sufficient demand to warrant republishing.

Often these are the books I want most and the only place to find many of them is when some collector dies and his library is sold.

I have made no effort to gather the so-called great books. Most of them I read during my knockab years. The books I have are of immediate as well as lasting interest, and already my library has grown beyond the space available. A book that stands on my shelf may well be the result of reading a dozen or twenty books or, at least, examining them, for I have tried to get the best.

If you come looking for old friends you will find a few. Candide, A Sentimental Journey, The Brothers Karamazov, Byron's Childe Harold, much of Tennyson, but many of the books will be strangers.

There will be books on the food that people ate and how they ate it, on their costumes, their homes, and how they entertained themselves. History to me is the story of people and how they lived, not just an endless story of dynasties and wars. They are a part of the story, of course, and my library is very complete on how wars were conducted, castles built and defended, armies supplied, and treaties arrived at.

The beauty of educating oneself as I was doing, or as anyone can do, is that there are no limits to what can be learned. All that is learned demands contemplation, and so one is never at a loss for something to do.

When writing of Chinese literature earlier, a book I failed to mention was the Chin P'ing Mei by Hsu Wei. This is a somewhat pornographic novel written of Hsi Men and his six wives, written at about the time of Shakespeare.

Meeting the censor on the street, the author was asked what he was writing, and was told that the censor wished to see it immediately upon its completion. At the time China was going through one of its periods of strict censorship, so Hsu Wei, according to the story, made plans.

He had his book printed on extremely thin rice paper and before submitting it to the censor he carefully planted a small dab of poison on the upper right-hand corner of each page.

Although involved with studying the Far East, I at no time neglected my study of the American West. Much of what I was writing concerned the West and it was my duty as a writer to present as honest a portrayal as possible.

To that end I was not only traveling the country but reading approximately thirty books a year on the West in its many aspects.

For example, I read Ancient Hunters of the Far West by Malcolm Rogers, Journey to the Rocky Mountains, 1839 by Fred A. Wizlenzenus, Humboldt to the Pacific by Jacob H.

Schiel, Conquest of New Mexico and California 1846-48 by Philip St.

George Cooke, A History of New Mexico by Gaspar Perez de Villagra, New England Indians, Volumes I and II, by Leo Bonfanti, and many more.

Along with these, I read The History of Ideas by George Boas, Journal of a Novel by John Steinbeck (which he kept while writing East of Eden), and The Natural Geography of Plants by Henry A. Gleason and Arthur Cronquist.

This is a fair sampling, but no more than that.

Most of this time I was crisscrossing the country with my family, visiting lonely water holes, old line-camps, cliff dwellings, and the places where frontier history happened.

Wherever possible, I took along some old cowboy or miner who would tell me who had lived where and who had worked the claims. Along with such information, there were always a lot of stories, glimpses of personalities, of bad horses, of bronc riders and Indians.

Prowling about in the mountains was always exciting, discovering areas I would someday use in a story or some bit of information that would add to another.

As I was writing one story, I was always preparing for others, and loving every moment of it.

People often ask me if I ride horseback. To tell you the truth, I have not been on a horse in years. Yet there is no reason why one should ride a horse to write about it, and I did my riding in the past. Now I ride to the sites I wish to explore in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and then get out and hike.

Why? Because I am constantly looking for artifacts, for plants I wish to identify, for others whose manner of growth I wish to understand.

To do this, it is better to be on foot. There are crevasses I wish to crawl into, ruins I wish to check out, and many such things.

If one of my characters is wounded, I want him to treat his wounds with what he would find available. Most western men were familiar with simple home remedies as well as some Indian treatments. Few people had ready access to a doctor, even in the eastern states, and the doctors themselves often used home remedies they had inherited from older physicians. One did the best one could with what one had, so in my stories the treatments used are what would be available at the time and place.

In the earliest days in the mountains, infection was rare. In the fresh mountain air and on the diet available, men recovered rapidly from serious wounds. Some of the Indian remedies were quite useful, but as we all know, many people simply recover. The mountain men, for example, and western men generally, were in excellent health to begin with.

Few carried even a pound of excess weight. Most were constantly moving, walking, running, bending, kneeling to set a trap, actively exercising. Their drinking binges were rare, as whiskey was available only in towns, and such bouts with the bottle were often separated by months or even years.

To write well of the West, it is essential to have considerable basic knowledge, and to continue to learn.

Many of the buffalo hunters, for example, disliked the killing, but it was their way of making a living, and no matter what one thinks now, the buffalo had to go. On those vast plains where buffalo roamed (and where a buffalo wants to go, he goes!) there are now great universities, hospitals, homes, and food enough raised to feed half the world.

Shortly after World War II, when I was living in Los Angeles, I often took the train or bus to one of the towns near the Grand Canyon. Several times it was Peach Springs, Arizona. I knew no one there but would get off the bus and backpack into the canyons branching off from the Grand Canyon and spend three or four days hiking wild country, alone.

Most of my friends or acquaintances had jobs from which they could not get away, and not many of them would accept the rugged conditions I took for granted. Another place I often went was the wilderness area of Sycamore Canyon in Arizona. In those days there was a small railroad--the Verde-Mix, I believe it was called--and for a couple of dollars one could buy a ticket and the train crew would drop you off and pick you up later. Several times I went up into the Sycamore Canyon area, exploring, camping, simply living the life.

It is a beautiful area, near Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona, but kept even now as a wilderness, as well it should be.

We are fortunate indeed to have the works of many enlightened, interested travelers in the West at its various stages. For my purposes, the West was any place beyond the existing frontier, which at first was east of the Appalachians. We have such works, for example, as Travels Through the Middle Settlements of North America, 1759-1760 by Reverend Andrew Burnaby, Travels in America 1798-1802 by John Davis, Early Travels in Tennessee by Samuel Cole Williams, and many others, including John Bradbury's Travels in the Interior of America in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811. In this latter case we were indeed fortunate, as Bradbury was a naturalist and was on the spot when the New Madrid earthquake happened, the most devastating quake to strike North America in historic times. The quake occurred in Missouri and the neighboring areas, created Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee, and was felt as far away as Boston, Massachusetts, and Charleston, South Carolina.

The West of which so much is written did not suddenly happen. It was built upon much that had gone before. The travel accounts mentioned earlier were through country where the stage was being set for a different kind of life.

I must add that some of the Englishmen traveling in the West were much offended that men did not spring to attend to their horses upon their arrival at an inn. There were usually men hanging about, but they were living in a country where men did for themselves, and not as in Britain or France, where someone was always ready to serve. The independence of the frontiersman offended some travelers, but the frontiersman had no reason to be obsequious. There were no class lines, and a man was what he made himself to be.

If the tavern in question had no one on hand to take one's horse, he stabled and fed it himself.

We are fortunate as well that there were so many travelers who not only wandered the country but wrote excellent accounts of what they saw, so we can know what it was like at almost any point in time.

My own family history was often a reference point for me. I have not written about it thus far, but it was useful in calculating the generations of other families. On one side of my family (and probably at least three)

I am a tenth-generation American, and I have used my own family as a measuring stick for others of whom I write.

Always, my reading was to understand, and it was for background. To re-create the life of a period in fiction, one must know as much as possible.

What were the roads and trails like? How were taverns kept? What food might be available to a traveler? What about homes at various financial levels? And clothing?

What did a pistol cost? Or ammunition?

If I knew how others were living, I would know how my characters had to live.

In checking out terrain, I often spent time just sitting and looking, or possibly hiking the trails to get an estimate of the time required.

How long would it take an able-bodied, reasonably athletic man to cross such a mountain? How long if he was injured in some way? Where could he find some primitive shelter if need be?

Many of the places about which I write were places I encountered during my knockab years, where I worked, passed through, or camped.

Others were simply places I passed by and noticed, or of which I learned from some chap in a caf`e.

By the time I married, all that was behind me, but much of the traveling I did with my family was important. By that time I had learned to focus on what was most essential and I was seeking out particular places or people.

In Colorado we visited Mesa Verde and its Anasazi ruins again and again, learning a little more each time. At least twice we were present at an Illuminaria, where the rooms of Cliff Palace were lighted at night by candles.

We arrived shortly before dark and were in place before the candles were lighted. We had with us our friend Charlie Daniels, the country-western singer, and Cliff Brycelea, the Navajo artist whose painting is featured on the cover of my book The Haunted Mesa. Cliff commented that what we were seeing must have been much what it was like when inhabited. From down the canyon came eerie music--bagpipes, I believe --but far enough away to provide a sense of added weirdness to the scene.

As the candles burned down, those of us who had brought flashlights helped to guide others over the narrow trails and up steep stairways. I believe if the ghosts of the Anasazi linger among those dwellings, they would have been pleased to see them lighted once again. It was a hauntingly beautiful sight that remains with me still.