Blue Highways (34 page)

Wonderland stopped at Manton. I should have asked the way to Viola, but I didn’t; instead I went hunting it up a highway through woods and new vineyards. The hills, unlike the weird rockiness I’d come from, looked softly rounded like full bellies. When the road became a narrow dirt trail, I turned around in the first clearing and headed back to Manton.

Travelers are supposed to ask directions, but I believed, as usual, that I could find the way. Encouraged by a sign pointing to Viola, I tried another road. I had only to follow. Sunset vanished as the pavement again went into the woods; it narrowed progressively to a pair of wet troughs, and pine boughs screeched against Ghost Dancing. Having backed away from two roads already that day, I wasn’t retreating again. Besides, I couldn’t have turned a unicycle around in the thick forest. Muddy holes a small man on a small unicycle would have disappeared in rocked the truck violently, and nothing gave evidence I was getting anywhere but in deeper. If a tree lay across the trail, I’d be locked in this blackness—this home of Sasquatch—for the night. On and on the pitching and squeaking. Why did I get into things like this? I wasn’t going to get to Viola—give up on that. Maybe I wasn’t even going to escape the woods unless I walked out.

But things got no worse. In fact, after a while, the wallows became shallower, the branches stopped screeching, the road widened, then the headlights bounced off striped pavement. Rain again. Ten minutes later I reached what must have been Viola, a few darkened houses. (Note to mapmakers: without a gas station, cafe, water tower, and stoplight, you don’t have a town.)

I drove on in anger, then in weariness, and my eyelids drooped. Nothing for miles of darkness until something loomed in front of the truck and gave a toothy grin just before I smunched it. Fearing what it might be, I stopped and ran back up the road. It lay shuddering, its legs trying to push it off the highway. I dreaded it. Whatever else it was, it was black, fat, and wet. I played the flashlight over the body. There: an improbable bag of prickles, a big porcupine, all thirty thousand quills of it, its sleepy feeble eyes glazed with shock. The legs stopped pushing and it died. I rolled it off the road as its belly sloshed, full of whatever watery greens it had just eaten.

What a day. Seagulls on the desert, rigged payoffs, mountains, Hallelujah Junction, Humbug Creek, a volcano, fairyland, vineyards, forest, mist, sun, rain, snow, a rainbow, doubt, hope—and now a goddamned dead porcupine. And here I was trying to make sense of things. I wiped the rain off my face and went on. Ten o’clock and I hadn’t eaten since noon. I understood that no highway went for long without getting rough, but I couldn’t break myself of the notion that whenever I hit good road it would hold to the end. I just couldn’t remember cycles, the circles.

A wooden sign in the headlamps pointed to a small state campground. I pulled in under the ponderosas, the rain dubbing hard. I got out some bread and put it back. Too tired. The truck was as dark as the inside of a stone, and I was about to sleep under a volcano that had exploded within living memory, and I kept seeing the yellow grin of a porcupine whose luck it was to have a path coincident with mine and end the day as a ball of bloody meat.

T
WO
Steller’s jaybirds stirred an argy-bargy in the ponderosa. They shook their big beaks, squawked and hopped and swept down the sunlight toward Ghost Dancing and swooshed back into the pines. They didn’t shut up until I left some orts from breakfast; then they dropped from the branches like ripe fruit, nabbed a gobful, and took off for the tops of the hundred-foot trees. The chipmunks got in on it too, letting loose a high peal of rodent chatter, picking up their share, spinning the bread like pinwheels, chewing fast.

It was May Day, and the warm air filled with the scent of pine and blooming manzanita. To the west I heard water over rock as Hat Creek came down from the snows of Lassen. I took towel and soap and walked through a field of volcanic ejections and broken chunks of lava to the stream bouncing off boulders and slicing over bedrock; below one cascade, a pool the color of glacier ice circled in effervescence. On the bank at an upright stone with a basin-shaped concavity filled with rainwater, I bent to drink, then washed my face. Why not bathe from head to toe? I wet down with rainwater and lathered up.

Now, I am not unacquainted with mountain streams; a plunge into Hat Creek would be an experiment in deep-cold thermodynamics. I knew that, so I jumped in with bravado. It didn’t help. Light violently flashed in my head. The water was worse than I thought possible. I came out, eyes the size of biscuits, metabolism running amuck and setting fire to the icy flesh. I buffed dry.

Then I began to feel good, the way the old Navajos must have felt after a traditional sweat bath and roll in the snow. I dressed and sat down to watch Hat Creek. A pair of dippers flew in and began feeding. Robin-like birds with stub tails and large, astonished eyes, dippers feed in a way best described as insane. With two or three deep kneebends (hence their name) as if working up nerve, they hopped into the water and walked upstream, completely immersed, strolling and pecking along the bottom. Then they broke from the water, dark eyes gasping. I liked Hat Creek. It was reward enough for last night.

Back at Ghost Dancing, I saw a camper had pulled up. On the rear end, by the strapped-on aluminum chairs, was something like “The Wandering Watkins.” Time to go. I kneeled to check a tire. A smally furry white thing darted from behind the wheel, and I flinched. Because of it, the journey would change.

“Harmless as a stuffed toy.” The voice came from the other end of the leash the dog was on. “He’s nearly blind and can’t hear much better. Down just to the nose now.” The man, with polished cowboy boots and a part measured out in the white hair, had a face so gullied even the Soil Conservation Commission couldn’t have reclaimed it. But his eyes seemed lighted from within.

“Are you Mr. Watkins?” I said.

“What’s left of him. The pup’s what’s left of Bill. He’s a Pekingese. Chinese dog. In dog years, he’s even older than I am, and I respect him for that. We’re two old men. What’s your name?”

“Same as the dog’s.”

“I wanted to give him a Chinese name, but old what’s-her-face over there in the camper wouldn’t have it. Claimed she couldn’t pronounce Chinese names. I says, ‘You can’t say Lee?’ She says, ‘You going to name a dog Lee?’ ‘No,’ I says, ‘but what do you think about White Fong?’ Now, she’s not a reader unless it’s a beauty parlor magazine with a Kennedy or Hepburn woman on the cover, so she never understood the name. You’ve read your Jack London, I hope. She says, ‘When I was a girl we had a horse called William, but that name’s too big for that itty-bitty dog. Just call him Bill.’ That was that. She’s a woman of German descent and a decided person. But when old Bill and I are out on our own, I call him White Fong.”

Watkins had worked in a sawmill for thirty years, then retired to Redding; now he spent time in his camper, sometimes in the company of Mrs. Watkins.

“I’d stay on the road, but what’s-her-face won’t have it.”

As we talked, Mrs. What’s-her-face periodically thrust her head from the camper to call instructions to Watkins or White Fong. A finger-wagging woman, full of injunctions for man and beast. Whenever she called, I watched her, Watkins watched me, and the dog watched him. Each time he would say, “Well, boys, there you have it. Straight from the back of the horse.”

“You mind if I swear?” I said I didn’t. “The old biddy’s in there with her Morning Special—sugar doughnut, boysenberry jam, and a shot of Canadian Club in her coffee. In this beauty she sits inside with her letters.”

“Letters?”

“Her hobby’s writing threatening letters to the phone company, the power and light. Whoever. After the kids left home, she took up hollering down rain barrels to occupy herself. You get like that if you don’t watch it. Got to watch how you get. She was complaining today about me spending my sunshine years just driving around and doing nothing constructive. She doesn’t know that’s what old men are
supposed
to do: stand and look. I told her so. ‘Besides,’ I says, ‘don’t give me that sunshine shit’—excuse me—‘I’m old and it didn’t come easy.’ I says, ‘You call me “old” if you go talking about me, damn you.’ Excuse me. If you ever get the choice of traveling with a German woman or a dog, don’t make a silly mistake.”

We talked about Lassen, and I told him about my dive in Hat Creek.

“When I first started coming over this way years ago,” he said, “you could drink out of it. Maybe you still can, but I’m afraid to try. Might kill me.” He laughed and the gullies in his cheeks changed courses. “I came out of the First War without a scratch. Lost a couple pals to whizzbangs, but I made it out. Just sick one time over there. We were camped in east France and took our water from a stream—real pretty little thing. Then, one after another, we commenced getting sick—deep sick in the guts. Few days later somebody found a dead German upstream. Water had washed away most of his hair and skin. What skin was left was horrible white and peeling off like wallpaper. I haven’t had a sip of stream water since.”

Mrs. Watkins shouted from the camper, “Where’s Bill?” Watkins rattled the leash and White Fong either barked or coughed. “All right,” she said.

“What kind of work you in?” he asked.

That question again. “I’m out of work,” I said to simplify.

“A man’s never out of work if he’s worth a damn. It’s just sometimes he doesn’t get paid. I’ve gone unpaid my share and I’ve pulled my share of pay. But that’s got nothing to do with working. A man’s work is doing what he’s supposed to do, and that’s why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn’t the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man’s work. Let me show you my philosophy of life.” From his pressed Levi’s he took a billfold and handed me a limp business card. “Easy. It’s very old.”

The card advertised a cafe in Merced when telephone numbers were four digits. In quotation marks was a motto: “Good Home Cooked Meals.”

“‘Good Home Cooked Meals’ is your philosophy?”

“Turn it over, peckerwood.”

Imprinted on the back in tiny, fading letters was this:

“I like it,” I said.

“Any man’s true work is to get his boots on each morning. Curiosity gets it done about as well as anything else.”

He wanted to look my rig over, which he did critically. “Not much here,” he said. “Now, my camper has most anything you’d want. Because of her. Even one of those Ping-Pong TV games. She says we have to have it to entertain the great-grandkids. I says to her, ‘Why can’t they look out the window?’ “

I laughed.

“You think I’m joking. Those kids won’t have anything unless wires come out of it. If I ran an extension cord down my pantleg and let them plug me in, then they’d believe they had a real great-granddad.”

Mrs. What’s-her-face whistled the call of the bobwhite out the door. “Well, boys, there you have it. That means come drink your Sanka and take your pill. Sanka! If I don’t watch it, it’s all going to come down to that.”

L
ASSEN
Peak is a kind of bookend to the bottom of the Cascade Range that runs single-file toward the Canadian border, where Mount Baker props up the other end. In between—preeminently—are Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, Hood, and Shasta. Their symmetric conical peaks average nearly twelve thousand feet and retain snowy summits all year; what’s more, they are part of the most volcanically active range in the conterminous states.

Highway 89 wound among the volcanic dumpings from Lassen that blasted Hat Creek valley about three hundred times between 1914 and 1917. Scrub covered the ash, cinders, and lava as the wasteland renewed itself; yet even still it looked terribly crippled. Off the valley floor, California 299 climbed to ride the rim of the Pit River gorge. I ate a sandwich at the edge of a deep rift that opened like jaws to expose rocks so far below they were several hundred million years older than the ones I sat on. From the high edge I looked down on the glossy backs of swallows as they glided a thousand feet, closed their wings like folded fans, and plummeted into the abyss. It was a wild, mad, silent, spectacular descent of green iridescence that left me woozy.

Again on the road, I drove up a lumpy, dry plateau, all the while thinking of the errors that had led me to Hat Creek. The word
error
comes from a Middle English word,
erren,
which means “to wander about,” as in the knight errant. The word evolved to mean “going astray” and that evolved to mean “mistake.” As for
mistake,
it derives from Old Norse and once meant “to take wrongly.” Yesterday, I had been mistaken and in error, taking one wrong road after another. As a result, I had come to a place of clear beauty and met a man who carried his philosophy on a cafe business card.