The Tokyo-Montana Express (2 page)

I keep asking myself a question that can’t
be answered: Why did Joseph Francl come to America in the first place and leave
so different a life behind him? There is just something inside of me that
cannot understand why he came here.

Gee, it’s such a long way from giving a
concert, perhaps Beethoven or Schubert, in Berlin or Vienna to Joseph Francl
describing the American West: …
after supper, we received a visit from a
real wild Indian, a chief of the Omaha tribe. He said he was looking for his
squaw. He had not seen her for two days, she was wandering around among the
emigrants
.

That is quite distant from a concert
audience waiting for the music to begin.

Joseph Francl left his own Czechoslovakian-born,
American-courted wife Antonia whom he called Tony and his young son Fred behind
in Wisconsin when he went out to California to find gold.

I’ve thought about him leaving Antonia
behind. I’ve thought about her waiting. She was just twenty years old. She must
have been very lonely. Her husband was gone for three years.

In the I854 West of Joseph Francl one sees
many birds like jerky old time silent movies (turkeys, quail, ducks, geese, snipes,
pheasants) and many animals like actors in those movies (buffaloes, elk,
wolves) and many fish like swimming silent titles (pike, catfish, perch) and
vast lonely areas that are not like movies where no one lives and the road is
slender and easy to lose:
We realized that we were wandering. The road we
are on looks dim, no one has been over it for a year. There are no human
tracks, but there are signs that wolves and larger animals have passed here. An
overpowering stillness oppresses us
.

It is a land inhabited by sly, dog-stealing
Indians who know how to get the best of you, even when you mount a small army
and go to their camp and demand the dog back, threatening the Indians with WAR!
if they do not return the dog (how very distant this is from Prague, Czechoslovakia,
and a brief career in classical music!) but the Indians are crafty in their
dog-stealing ways and offer a horse in return for the dog, but work things so
that the horse never actually changes hands, and the men return (including Joseph
Francl) dogless to their camp and without the promised horse, knowing that they
have been had. The dog is lost and the Indians are just too God-damn smart.

The people that Joseph Francl met on his
way West are mentally cross-eyed and archetypically funky. I do not think your
well-balanced section of society chooses to pioneer the frontier. It is always
a breed of strange, half-crazy people who go to make their lives where no one
else has lived.

Joseph Francl starts right off in the
beginning, I mean, he doesn’t fool around, travelling with three insane German
brothers and another German who dreams of German military glory and world
supremacy.

This was in 1854!

And of course they all got drunk on their
first day out and were terribly hung over, including Joseph Francl who cared
for his beer and other liquors, too.

In and out of his travelling vision of the
West, wander a cheating landlord, a charlatan doctor, a cynical farmer, wild, Godless
hunters and trappers whom Joseph Francl thinks would look strange in the
streets of Europe: Their clothing speaks for them.
They could not walk
through the streets of any European city, nor would they be permitted to do so,
without bringing a crowd around them, the members of which would ask each other
what sort of comedians are these?

He meets a smart-assed adulterous wife and
her simple good-hearted stupid cuckolded husband, a judge going out to Utah to
administer justice and cleanup at the same time with $25,000 worth of dry goods
that he`s going to sell to the Mormons whom Joseph Francl considers to be an unchaste
breed of humanity, a hungry Indian chief who did not thank Joseph Francl for
giving him dinner, a licentious clergyman and his pretty mistress-cook, a band
of extorting Sioux Indians, just back from war with the Pawnees, carrying with
them twenty-one Pawnee scalps which they show a great deal of affection toward,
and the kind owner of a wagon train that gave Joseph Francl some dinner and
some flour when he was very hungry.

In the Placerville gold country of California
he met two men who gave him a bad deal on a dry claim and he dealt with
merchants that extended credit to him for his unrequited search for wealth
while he lived in an abandoned Chinaman’s shack, looking for gold, and finally
he had to go to work for someone who wasn`t very well off himself.

Things just did not work out for Joseph
Francl in California, a land that he describes as
this beautiful but unfortunate
country
.

And all the time that he was gone his wife
Antonia waited in Wisconsin for his return. She was also in poor health. Three
years passed. That’s a long time for a young woman who’s not feeling well.

We arrived in camp on the third day amid
a big rain and thunder storm and supper was served with difficulty. I was just
pouring out the tea when I heard
—

But we’ll never know what Joseph Francl
heard because part of his diary was lost right after
when I heard
—

I find the breaks in his diary very
beautiful like long poetic pauses where you can hear the innocence of eternity.

Just before
when I heard
—he was
working as a cook on a wagon train and there was a lot of Indian trouble. Some Pawnee
Indians were really making it hard on them. Most of the Indians didn’t have any
clothes on. They were running around naked, except for their weapons, and they
did not have pleasant ideas in their minds.

…
when I heard
—

We’ll never know.

When we are returned to his narrative, we
find him at the beginning of the Great Plains, and what he heard is lost
forever.

The next break in his writing is a chosen
one. He is at Fort Laramie and he says,
I will not describe the rest of my journey
to Salt Lake City, for I do not remember that anything of interest occurred
.

Then suddenly he is in Salt Lake City and
nothing is described in between as if the distance from Fort Laramie (over 400
miles) to Salt Lake City were just a door that you opened and stepped through.

Joseph Francl’s diary ends with him in the
Sierra Mountains, waking up in the morning covered with snow. And Antonia
waited in Wisconsin for her husband, who was Joseph Francl covered with snow,
worrying about him, and when he would be back.

Three long years passed.

Joseph Francl finally returned to Antonia
who was now twenty-three years old. She must have been very happy. She probably
threw her arms around him and cried.

Then he settled down for a while and they
had five more children and he returned to his old Prague musical ways. He
taught piano and singing and was the director of the Mendelssohn Singing
Society in Watertown, Wisconsin.

He also worked as a county clerk for years
and then in 1869 he moved to Crete, Nebraska, and started a general store there
in 1870, but business was bad, so in I874 for some God-damn California dreaming
reason, he left his wife Antonia and a bunch of children behind in Crete and
returned to Placerville, looking for gold again. This was years after the gold
rush was over.

He didn’t write about his trip to
California this time. He just went there. Of course things didn’t work out for
him this time either. He even lived in the same Chinaman’s shack that he lived
in twenty years before.

Joseph Francl was never destined to make
anything out of California, so he went to visit his oldest son Fred who was now
grown and living up near Walla Walla, Washington, chopping wood for a living.

Fred was the American grandson of a Czechoslovakian
brewery and glassworks owner. How distant the seeds of blood are blown over
this world.

In the spring of 1875, Joseph Francl walked
from Placerville to Portland, Oregon. That is 650 miles of walking. He turned
right at the Columbia River and walked up to the Blue Mountains where his son
lived.

Working conditions were poor in Washington,
so he, his son, and a friend of his son decided to go to California where
things might be better (Oh no!) and Joseph Francl was off on his third trip to
California.

They travelled on horses, but it was a bad
winter and Joseph Francl’s son Fred decided to turn back and go by ship to
California, leaving his father and his friend to continue on horses to
California.

OK: So now it was son by ship and father by
horse to California. Things are really getting strange now. The story of Joseph
Francl is not an easy one.

Joseph Francl got sick travelling through
Oregon, and he didn’t eat anything tor eleven days and then he was delirious
for several days. I do not know what form his delirium took but perhaps Indians
and concert halls were a part of it.

Then Joseph Francl got lost from his
travelling companion who looked for him, then went for help. When the search
party found him a few clays later, he was lying facedown in the snow, dead, and
he was not unhappy.

In his delirium he probably thought that
death was California. Isle was buried at Fort Klamath, Oregon, on December 10,
1875 in a grave that was lost forever. It was the end of his American
childhood.

Antonia Francl died in Crete, Nebraska, on
November 21, 1911, and all the waiting that could ever be done was over now.

“I have a short lifeline,” she says.
“Damn it.”

We’re lying together under the sheet. It’s
morning. She’s looking at her hand. She’s twenty-three; dark hair.

She’s very carefully looking at her hand.

“Damn it!”

That’s why I forgot the bottle this
morning because the Japanese squid fishermen are asleep and I was thinking about
them being asleep.

Last night before I went to bed at one o’clock,
I could see them fishing for squid. Their boats were anchored down below on the
Pacific Ocean and there were lights shining from the boats. They used the
lights to attract squid. The four boats of the Japanese squid fishermen were
arranged perfectly like stars in the sky. They were their own constellation.

That’s why I forgot the bottle. I thought
about them fishing until dawn and maybe having a drink or two before going to
sleep. I should have been thinking about the bottle instead of sleeping Japanese
squid fishermen.

I brought the bottle to Japan with me a
month ago.

Its history is sort of interesting. One
night a few weeks before I left San Francisco for Japan, I was sitting in a bar
with some friends and we came up with the idea of writing little messages and
putting them in a bottle that I would take with me to Japan and throw into the
sea.

The bartender who’s a good friend of mine
got a very solid empty bottle whose previous occupant had been some Drambuie
and we all started writing messages but we didn’t show them to each other. As
each person wrote a message, he kept it to himself, not showing it to anyone else
and then put it in the bottle and after a few hours there were maybe thirty-five
or forty messages in the bottle. It resembled the cross-section of an evening
in an American bar.